Sights and Science

Over the past few days Josh and I have been struggling to come back to a normal sleep schedule after our overnight operations Monday night. This has made for a few lethargic days here at the Holiday House! But now I have the energy to share some stories of our most recent days in Portugal.

Part I: Sights
First, I want to start with an absolutely shameless plug for the keepers of our accommodations here in Alvaiade. Luc and Vera are an extremely kind Belgian couple who keep a bed and breakfast called Casa das Estevas and the neighboring Holiday House in which we are staying. The house is lovely and well kept, but beyond this Luc and Vera go above and beyond to make our stay comfortable. Last Sunday they drove us out to the little village of Arnerio, which is a little more than 5km south of Alvaiade. From there, they led us on a wonderful day hike up to the top of the Portas de Rodao above the River Tejo. The views were spectacular including landscape vistas, interesting wildlife like the large and impressive Griffon Vulture, and neat little bits of history including the gold-panning past.

The rocky fields were amazing! We spotted them from the peak of our hike then continued down to them. The rocks were smooth and perfectly rounded presumably by the river from which they were pulled during gold-panning activities. The expanse of these stones was incredible. We climbed up one of the mounds of these rocks, and the sound they made when ground under our feet was quite strange. A hollow, ethereal sound that I never would have expected to come from rocks. Once we finished our hike we came back into the village, and Luc and Vera treated us to “een pint” (rhymes with hint), Dutch for a little beer. It was a refreshing way to finish an active and beautiful hike through the Portuguese countryside.

Part II: Science
Monday night I posted a snippet blog of our first Supersonde IOP (intensive observation period). I’ll offer a bit more detail now. In addition to the weather balloons we release every six hours each day, we have enough balloons to do four Supersonde IOPs, during which we launch balloons every 3 hours from noon to 6am the next morning. I found this cool website about weather balloons/radiosondes if you want to learn more about what they do. The supersonde schedule looks like this:
12:15pm – normal launch time
03:15pm – supersonde launch
06:15pm – normal launch time
09:15pm – supersonde launch
12:15am – normal launch time
03:15am – supersonde launch
06:15am – normal launch time
We want to call Supersone IOPs on nights with few clouds so that the ground cools freely – clouds at night can act like a blanket keeping the heat from the daytime trapped near the ground. These conditions allow for a stable boundary layer to develop. A stable boundary layer is defined as a layer of cool air near the surface of the earth where the air is stably stratified. That just means the air above this cool layer is warm. Since warm air rises and cold air sinks, cool air at the surface does not want to rise and we call that stable as opposed to unstable air which has the tendency to rise and therefore mix (like a pot of boiling water). Stable boundary layers are interesting because many complex and poorly understood flows can happen within them. We also want to target nights with relatively calm winds so that the tethered lifting systems (TLS) operated by the University of Colorado–Boulder and the Army Research Laboratory can both fly during the IOP. We hope that these IOPs can help us understand more about stable boundary layer flows.

The first Supersonde IOP was last Monday night. Josh and I launched a ballon at 3pm (which I showed in the previous blog), then we went home and had dinner while the normal 6pm launch was completed by NCAR. Then we returned for the 9pm launch and were in it for the long haul. After the 9pm launch, we walked down to the CU-Boulder crew operating the TLS.

We learned about the ascent-descent profiles this system observes. It can fly up to 500m above the surface! We also made a friend with an Empusa pennata, commonly called a conehead mantis. We had never seen this type of praying mantis before, but he and Josh became buddies and he checked out the TLS data!

Time passed quickly and we soon had to say goodbye to our human and bug friends and head back up the hill to the midnight sounding. On our way up, Josh and I noticed a strong temperature gradient with cold air at the base of the valley and warmer air up near the sounding site. It was cool to sense this ourselves and verify it with instruments! The midnight sounding went up, and we got to enjoy one perk of being up so late! The time difference meant we could catch the Pittsburgh Penguins Stanley Cup Playoff game! Josh and I are both Pens fans, so we had the game skype-screenshared to us so we could enjoy the Pens win live. This passed the time until the 3am sounding was launched and almost until we were finished tracking it. Finally, we got to head home and I found myself in bed at 4:50am. A long night of science, but also a little fun.

I’m going to leave you with a couple weird slow-motion videos Josh and I took of preparing our late night snack of strawberries and whipped cream on the site. Late night fieldwork makes things seem funny or cool that probably aren’t… but here they are anyway. Fieldwork is weird, but fun. Also, French President-brand whipped cream is TO DIE FOR.

Elizabeth