Flying back home

by  | 27. November 2019

It has been almost one month and the second phase of SouthTRAC has come to an end. HALO, after flying to Buenos Aires and then to Cape Verde is since today back home in Oberpfaffenhofen. Once the aircraft left, we packed everything in the hangar and then headed to the city for a last minute souvenir shopping (especially dulce de leche, a typical sweet from Argentina). We also had a farewell dinner, to celebrate the fruitful campaign and say bye to all the colleagues from the different universities and research centers.

SouthTRAC was a successful campaign during which we could sample gravity waves, determine trace gas structures, probe aged air masses and study the exchange troposphere – stratosphere, among others. We go back to Germany with lots of interesting data that we will continue analyzing to learn more and more about our atmosphere.

As a farewell, here a selection of pictures from our staying in Argentina.

 HALO, Desdemona wreck and guanaco. Pictures by Joern Ungermann, Forschungszentrum Juelich

 

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SOUTHTRAC: communicating our work

by  | 25. November 2019

Hi everybody! Long time without posting, since the WISE campaign back in 2017.

This year I joined the second phase of SouthTRAC and I am mainly helping with the ground control of the GLORIA instrument. This means monitor from ground what GLORIA is doing during the flights and write down any relevant information about its performance and the meteorological situation.

However, I won’t continue talking about my work here, but about some of the social activities in which we have participated. These activities are important because we can communicate what we are doing here and why (as Markus explained in his first post Welcome to the SouthTRAC campaign).

One event was the so called The Armada day. As you know, we are in the naval air base at Rio Grande and that day we gave a presentation to all the personal working here about the main goals of SouthTRAC, a quick overview about the instruments, and of course, they could also have a closer look to HALO. People were very curious about our work here and it was a very positive experience to explain all about it.

Presentation Armada Day. Picture by Jens-Uwe Grooss, Forschungszentrum Juelich

The second activity of this phase was the visit of HALO to Punta Arenas, Chile. There, some of our colleagues met with scientists of different Chilean institutes that cooperate in SouthTRAC and also gave an interview to the local newspapers.

Other event was an interview in Spanish in the radio of the National University of Tierra del Fuego, Antarctica and Islands of the southern Atlantic (UNTDF for its initials in Spanish). The program is mainly about astrophysics but they also include topics related to the atmosphere. For the program of last Wednesday, Dr. Tomás Rafael Bolaño Ortiz and I were invited. Tomás is a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council in Argentina (CONICET for its initials in Spanish), who is also cooperating in the campaign. His research consists in evaluating the atmospheric aerosols effect on the snow melting in the Central Andes. During the program we had a lot of fun learning about the life of Tycho Brahe and talking about our work.

Hope you enjoyed this post, another one coming very soon!

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Nice things to see from a plane

by  | 7. October 2017

There are some very nice things you can spot from a plane. Not only clouds and the ant farms that actually are cities but also atmospheric phenomena. I have seen for the first time a “Glory”  on my way to Ireland. On top, a colleague (Peter Hoor from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz) took a very nice picture of so-called “Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities” on a research flight with HALO last week. So I just wanted to show you the pictures here and give you a short explanation on what it is.

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