Trip to Quebec

So the aircraft went to Quebec today and actually as I am writing this we are waiting for confirmation that they have refuelled successfully and have taken off again. The aircraft took off from Halifax at 12:00 pm local time and Guy Gratton managed to get a picture of it.

The BAe146 taking off

From Halifax they headed north west and then turned more westerly. They saw some strong indications that they were sampling air from a plume beleived to have originated over the fires in Ontario. Carbon monoxide was even higher than on Monday and other biomass burning tracers were measured. They also saw some short lived reactive compounds at 20,000 ft which is very interesting. After transitioning in and out of the plume for a long time and over quite a large spatial area they landed in Quebec to refuel. 

And we just have news that they are airbourne again, but there are forecasts of lightning so they will have to keep an eye out for that. Tom Duck at Dalhousie University is seeing some aerosol at low altitudes from his lidar (~2 and 4.5 km altitude) which agrees well with Mark's predictions. 

On the far right hand side you can see a light blue/green layer at 2km and a red layer coming in at 4-5km. These are aerosol layers that may indicate that they are seeing a biomass burning plume at Dalhousie. Follow the plot updating at http://aolab.phys.dal.ca/data/current/

Latest news says that the route of the aircraft has had to be changed because of the lightning and bad weather so hopefully there won't be any serious delays and they will still see some exciting stuff. Keep track of where we are up to at http://faam.badc.rl.ac.uk/public/gluxe_position/satmap.html

Lightning strikes across the area we are flying in.