Today is an interesting day as rarely to we have conditions with so few clouds. So much for yesterday’s prediction, it went exactly the other way.

Here I show the lidar backscatter and humidity; our lidar finally came up a couple of days ago thanks to Marvin of CIMH. 

The air is rather crystalline… not unlike Hamburg’s sky (okay we had way way more aerosol). Notice the scale only goes to 5 km and the moist layer is mostly confined to 2 km. The noise in the water vapor data is from they daytime contamination (noise from sunlight) but still a reasonably measureable signal. The last image is from the all-sky camera and the surface radiation measurements yesterday…  today I guess will be even clearer; the big spikes are clouds; usually there are many more spikes due to the radiation being scattered.

Sometimes you can learn the most about clouds by studying the days when they are not there. So hopefully we can look forward to some of these during EUREC⁴A too.

Compare this to the last image from Terra a few hours before.
Boom goes the convection … swoosh goes the cold pool.