Submitted at(UTC): 2007/06/04 19:51
Today we had a significant storm over Japan and east of Japan. The model showed dust on the eastern side of the storm which we were interested in sampling, especially if it happened to be incorporated into cloud. Our track eastbound took us through an area of upper level cloud which had higher levels of CO. We flew out of that area into a cleaner area, obtaining cloud samples in both polluted and cleaner air. We were able to revise our clearance to make two repeat passes through that area, although we did have a possible data gap in some of the recorded variables. There were very interesting aspects of this region--low values of ccn and higher values of CO for example, in a likely area of dust. This will be an interesting case study. We continued to an area southeast of the storm and did a vertical profile in nearly cloud free air. We then climbed to 270 and approached the storm from the southeast quadrant. Once over the storm, we made a series of up and down ascent/descent profiles, with the lowest part just below the bases of the main cloud regions. At one point, as we began that series, I noted a layer of enhanced CO in the upper portions of the clouds. All in all a good day with a few instrument issues that are reported in the instrument summary.