Our connectivity to the site remains down. We think it is just the internet, i.e., we are collecting data, but just not able to log it remotely. We are working on getting someone to look at the internet connection. So we are back to Worldview… (A1) and what a world of difference when I look at today’s image. A few remarks:

1. now you know why it is nice to be on the upwind side of the island when looking at clouds.
2. here the convection shows some mesoscale bloches of more or less organizaiton but overall is much more random.

Why? My first impulse was that maybe it wasn’t as radiatively driven; but looking at the sounding we still have a very dry (radiatively transparent) free troposphere, so the radiative cooling in the boundary layer will be not much different. Other aspects of the sounding from today (A2) are also not that different from what we saw some days ago when we have the beautiful cloud forms imitating floral arrangements. But what struck me was the difference in the wind speed. Compare the wind-barbs for the low level wind from today (A2) compared to last week (A3).  

Some News: Our HD(CP)² meeting ended today and I had a chance to talk to Martin Hagen from DLR. It seems that he and Silke Gross are exploring the possibilities of getting the DLR scanning C-band radar to Barbados. That would be a really terrific addition. Also I talked to Norbert Kalthoff, and he said he would discuss within his institute the possibility of getting the KIT (Windtracer) wind-lidar to the Island.  This windlidar is much more sophisticated than the vertically staring instrument which we have… and could really provide a fantastic view of cold pools and convergence boundaries. Finally as another great bit of news Sandrine and I have had some exchanges with the WHOI group (Sebastien Bigorre) about a possible ship deployment. Seb writes that they just concluded their yearly NTAS cruise (what timing) where they turned around the surface mooring and are in the process of working on a 10-years met climatology at NTAS. Finally some of the instrumentation is up and running again at Ragged point (hurray) and Ovid apparently has the CCN measurements going…

Based on this good news, I propose that we imagine that our first virtual experiment received ESA funding to allow a slight extension, and we carry on until next Friday … the 24th.