The site looked kind of boring today, but interesting things are on the way. Maybe Sabrina and Friedl can sample them.  What struck me was this beautiful blume, headed directly to the site (Fig 1.)

It made me wonder about how that would look if we were flying, so I zoomed out and used my imagination to interpret the organization of the flow, and overlay some rough ideas about the planned flight areas and size of the circles we would survey. Those are attached in Fig. 2. Also attached is an indicator showing where the very cool NTAS buoy is sitting. One gets a sense of the scale of these things.  But wouldn’t it be cool if we were flying today and saw this bouquet moving through?

Well and I couldn’t but resist to go to GOES and make a movie, which is large and you will find here:

https://owncloud.gwdg.de/index.php/s/LIKqnMt08EPoF0G

I couldn’t help but thinking that the whole second line of flowers blossomed in cohesion … and then you could see more signs of sugar late in the day, between the flowers, maybe it was there all along and just an effect of the sun angle? So I’m curious what happens to this patch as it moves over our site.  It was about 300 km away at 1540 UTC, if it moves at 6 m/s then in the video which is about 5 hrs it would have moved 100 km; my sense was that it was going a bit slower than that .. so let’s say it might arrive at the site in about 12 hours .. maybe Sabrina should get up early and launch some sondes?

Or maybe someone is motivated to put together 60hs of water vapor data from the lidar into a time-series and we can see what things look like? After all it is the weekend, which means we don’t have to work .. so finally we have time to play.