Between September 7-9, ARM researchers and international collaborators involved in flight operations for the Tropical Warm Pool International Cloud Experiment, or TWP-ICE, met at Sandia National Laboratories to simulate daily mission planning during the month-long field campaign, which begins in January 2006. With the possibility of up to five aircraft in the sky at one time at various altitudes, coordination and communication between the pilots and ground control will be critical to the success of the experiment. About 25 scientists and pilots discussed how they would handle the decision process for whether to fly or not on a given day; communications protocols while planes are in the air; and a nominal schedule for pre- and post-mission briefings.

Each day of the meeting, the team ran several days worth of actual mission planning, starting with a weather forecast to determine conditions suitable for science flights. If all agreed to fly the following day, the next step would be a meeting of the mission planning and flight management team to determine a primary mission and alternate mission for the aircraft identified to participate the following day. A follow-up meeting would be held the following morning, a few hours prior to a prospective mission to verify that conditions were favorable for flying. The activities would then move to the air base, where the pilots would be briefed on their missions and prepare their aircraft for the day’s missions. Mission control during the experiment will be at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) Northern Territory regional office where continual monitoring of the aircraft and weather radars will take place. At the end of each day’s flights, a post-mission briefing will be held between the flight and science teams.

The international TWP-ICE campaign will take measurements of cloud and radiative properties from instrumentation located at a network of ground stations, on a ship off the coast of Darwin, and on a fleet of research aircraft. The aircrafts’ scientific mission is to obtain measurements of cloud microphysics in situ microphysics and the atmospheric state in different regions of cirrus anvils and at different altitudes. These data will be used to validate data obtained from the surface, particularly the ARM site in Darwin. To achieve their scientific objectives, the science team must also take advantage of the right weather conditions. Continual weather forecasting, provided by the BOM, will help the science team determine flight days and the appropriate mission objectives for each plane.