HAMSR over Earl
Thursday, September 2, 2010
HAMSR worked flawlessly during the entire 24-hour period the GH was in the air for the Earl sortie. We were able to sample both the environment and the inner core, with numerous passes over the eye as the storm weakened and the eye wall structure changed. We expect to soon have preliminary temperature retrievals in the eye and will be able to determine the temperature anomaly vs. height and as a function of time. We also tested our new algorithm to retrieve reflectivity profiles, and that looks very promising. We should have a sample available soon and are looking forward to a comparison with APR-2 for the co-flight segments.
Please note that full sets of HAMSR quicklook images are available at the HAMSR web site (http://microwavescience.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/geplotarea/ with a Google Earth viewer and http://microwavescience.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/plotarea/ for separate images). We will also soon copy the quicklook images to the official reporting site.
The attached sample image shows one pass over the eye as seen in a 50-GHz near-surface channel. There is a convective burst NE of the eye (confirmed by the lightning detections shown there), which shows up clearly even in that channel (i.e. as sharply lower brightness temperatures due to scattering).
