“Drinking room-temperature water and playing cards by the candlelight” is what I heard they were doing up at Cape Cod when a massive blizzard knocked out power in the region in February this year.
By “they,” I mean a group of technicians and climate scientists who were waiting out the bad weather to start flight operations from the Barnstable airport. The team was just heading into their first full week of research flights onboard a G-1 aircraft that is designed to collect high-precision climate and weather-related measurements at different flying altitudes.
The aircraft-based facility and another ground-based instrument suite (in this case supplementing the air-based measurements) were deployed simultaneously at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, last summer. Together, the two formed the Two-Column Aerosol Project (TCAP), which was funded by the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Climate Research Facility and led by Larry Berg, a scientist at Pacific National Northwest Laboratory. The goal of this campaign was to collect measurements of aerosols over the land and ocean off the east coast of the United States to help scientists better understand the link between different type of aerosols and climate. You can find more details about the operation on the TCAP web page.
After the operation winds down tomorrow, the team will process all of these observations and data to understand the whys and why nots, include them in climate models, and finally publish them. I will try to keep you updated about what they learn, but it may not be fast. These things take time.
The power outage during the February blizzard mostly affected the flight operation, not the ground-based one.
In this post, I share with you a photo story about what really happened when the lights went out during the blizzard in February, when the Cape lost power and flight operations had to be shut down for a few days. TCAP folks did not huddle in—at least not always. Jason Tomlinson, Larry Berg, and Jennifer Comstock, three team members, shared with us their photos of the Cape in those dark wintery days that look, and almost feel, refreshingly cool as the summer heat builds up.
As for me, when the blizzard hit, I was about two months into my job on the ARM Communications Team in Richland, Washington, getting used to the fact that winters can be mild and enjoyable. Because, you see, Boston used to be my home not long ago. Blizzards are not foreign to me. These photos made me very nostalgic, and I felt colder than it was in my office at PNNL.
But where were you? Share some of your photos and maybe we will learn where some of you where when the “Blizzicane” touched down in New England.
The ARM team joins me in thanking everyone at the Cape who helped, supported, and welcomed the TCAP operations into their hearts, homes, and homeland. Please feel free to join festivities at the Highlands Center as the last day of operations winds down.
Ciao—and remember, measurements matter!