Joint Airborne IASI Validation Experiment (tc4) at UW-Madison SSEC/CIMSS

SHIS had another successful flight today with pre-flight and Engineering figures posted on the SHIS web site. Only the ER2 flew today with DC8 grounded due to a lightning strike on the flight on Tuesday. The goal of this flight was a CALIPSO/CloudSat comparison with the ER2. Due to thunderstorms in near San Jose the flight returned early, missing the CALIPSO/CloudSat overpass. The ER2 pilot reported a very thin cirrus layer, about 1 km thick, at 46,000 feet (~14 km). The Cloud Physics Lidar (CPL) worked well. This will be a good case to run S-HIS cloud retrievals on thin cirrus. Unfortunately the cloud radar failed at the begining of the flight so no radar data is available. 

S-HIS had a good flight and plots are on the web. Next possible flight is Saturday.

NOTES from pilot briefing
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- No S-HIS fail lights.
- Flew West (Pacific) over small isolated convective cell (no cirrus), otherwise low overcast.
- Flew East (Caribbean) nearly to the Bahamas and back. 80% clear. Low scatted Cu. (Note: This is over a Sahara Air Layer.) No visible cirrus.
- COSSIR(Wang) and CRS(Heymsfeld) failed after about 15:30 UTC
- Very thin high cirrus near coast of Costa Rica.

S-HIS looks good from today’s flight. Engineering plots are on the web:

http://deluge.ssec.wisc.edu/~shis/TC4_2007/

Pilot Notes
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- no fail lights (for any instruments)
- no clouds on departure
- used VHF antenna often for aircraft coordination with DC-8
- zero turbulence
- there was a cloud higher than the plane to the northeast of the race track
- 3.5 loops
- overflew an convective core at 16:15 UTC ~45-50K feet