After yesterday we had neither good chances to get airborne nor any area where we located good measuring conditions, for Thursday we planned an flight at 10 am. Unfortunately, the low level clouds of interest did not remain only above the sea but also in Inuvik, including some flurries in the morning. So the take-off had to be postponed to 12 local. Due to the later departure and an approaching midlevel cloud band moving eastwards into the measurement area, the planned rectangular flight pattern was skipped by only flying the easternmost leg. Polar 5 reported very good measuring conditions for remote sensing. A solid uninterrupted stratus cloud deck with 8/8 coverage at low levels was present all the time between roughly 1500 ft and 3000 ft. Different to the clouds the surface below the clouds was quite in-homogeneous with a mixture of open water, small and large ice flows. This looked very interesting for our investigations. Overall the wind in the area were very calm and conditions were stable. So the lidar profile showed an almost perfect symmetry for the flight in both directions.
Below Polar 5, Polar 6 sampled the cloud top entrainment zone in a long ''linear'' flight path for about 43 minutes. Sampling the cloud top was done at different altitudes, once inside the cloud, once closely above cloud top. Towards the end of leg significant icing on aircraft and wing probes occurred (as well as at the sampling inlets) such that the aircraft could not enter the clouds afterwards anymore. So Polar 6 returned directly to Inuvik performing a long staircase for aerosol and trace gas measurements in the cloud free, clear air for 100 minutes.
For details read here: http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~racepac/flights/flight_06.html
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