Helicopter arrived and Camp installed

This is our camp on Graciosa airport. The ACTOS-container and 'office'-tent. We are ready to test all instruments now.
At 2 pm the helicopter arrived from Sao Miguel island. The pilots were guided to their parking position by the airport manager Manuela Santos. Welcome Alwind and Jürgen on Graciosa!


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Short bye to Pico - My visit at Graciosa and the Helicopter-flight on Monday, 17th of July

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Clouds over Graciosa - the only clouds that were close enough that day Last week Silvia asked me if I am interested in visiting the scientist-group at Graciosa and if I want to see how research and daily work is going on at Graciosa-airport. After shortly thinking about it (and some slight worries, that in the meantime when I am at Graciosa there could be another shut-down at the ICO-Station on Pico mountain) Birgit organized the flights. The trip to Graciosa took a whole day, because there were no direct flights from Pico to Graciosa and so I started around 9 am. First I had to take the ferry from Madalena to Horta and had my first flight from Faial to Terceira. After waiting a few hours at Terceira-airport I took of at 16:10pm and 30 minutes later I arrived at Graciosa. View from the helicopter It was nice to see how the group worked together and after a nice welcome, they introduced me a little in how everything works at the airport. The next day ...
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Final flight or one more?

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Below the helicopter Eye-to-eye with a cloud The helicopter returned from Pico with everyone smiling. As ACTOS and SMART-HELIOS were ready for take-off, the smile of the pilots got a bit smaller due to their reduced lunch break. But nevertheless, we started at 12:55. As the Stratocumulus was too far to the north, we decided to make some Aerosol-legs. In total we did four of them on 7000 ft, 4000 ft, 2000 ft and 1000 ft, so one above the inversion and 3 below. We saw some slashes of wales. But every time we got closer, they disappeared again. During our flights we overflew and circumnavigated some single cumulus clouds. In the end, the only stratocumulus like cloud was in the lee of the island. On our way back, we sampled this cloud flying upstream to the island. Then we safely returned to the airport after almost two hours. SMART-HELIOS worked again the whole time with a reduced sensor package, while the inertial moment unit of ACTOS failed. Thus, it will be hard to corre...
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Another Aerosol flight and view to Pico

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Today it was a perfect aerosol flight again. Although the 'cloud people' was a bit frustrated, aerosol people were happy to get good data. After a profile up to 7000 ft we flew horizontal legs between to fixed points in different heights. The sub cloud layer (up to 750 m) was well mixed and number concentration of particles was quite constant in one height while number concentration in the free troposphere (FT) was changing a lot. There was again a sharp increase in number concentration (6000 ft) near the probable inversion, it was again higher in the FT. We could manage a flight leg directly under the clouds as well as a cloud profile. A 10 min leg was flown in 2000 ft and 1000 ft to calculate vertical transport of aerosols. We also were lucky to have a great view on Mount Pico and the Island Graciosa, where from now on all measurements are set up and running (Thanks to Kay and Karine and Pico-Team!).   ACTOS camp from the air: everyone is waiting for the landi...
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