The CARTHE-LASER team is extraordinarily busy preparing for the upcoming experiment, which will be conducted from January 15th to February 15th, 2016.  With only one week to go, we thought we would share how various team members were getting ready for this exciting mission.

• Cedric Guigand has been working with Guillaume Novelli and Dan Carlson on the design of the drifters and the aerostat, respectively.  He stated that the last drifter parts should be in by Monday, Jan 11th. (Let’s hope there are no delay in shipping!) All of the 1000 GPS units are assembled and ready. The aerostat is getting a few last minute design upgrades.  The trucks with two 20 foot containers are leaving on the 15 of January with (hopefully) all our drifter parts. More than 5 metric tons of equipment is going to be shipped! 

• In the SUSTAIN lab, Brian Haus’ team is testing the various sensor packages and data acquisition systems that will be deployed aboard both research vessels. Also, the facility is serving as the staging area for the Lagrangian surface drifters so there is a lot of action going on in this space.

• Milan Curcic is in charge of maintaining and running UWIN-CM (Unified Wave INterface – Coupled Model) in real-time in support of LASER. The coupled model forecasts of weather, waves, and currents will be used by the scientists in the field on a daily basis to determine the optimal ship and aircraft operations and instrument deployments. To prepare, he is making sure everything about the model and the compute cluster we use works as expected and all incoming data feeds are healthy.

• Falko Judt, National Center for Atmospheric Research, is the LASER forecaster.  He has provided daily weather forecasts for both of our previous experiments, GLAD and SCOPE.  He will serve this role once again, providing daily weather briefings using the UWIN-CM model predictions.  Though most of his work will be during the experiment, he has already started looking at the conditions that our team will face.