Update on Progress and Sources of Information

So the BAe146 ARA took off from Cranfield, UK yesterday and travelled down to Horta in the Azores where it stayed overnight. This morning it took off again to fly first to St John's and after a quick refuel, to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Early reports sent from Professor Ally Lewis who is mission scientist for the transit flight suggest that all instruments being operated on the transit are working well with a few minor issues at high altitude. Inflight data seemed to follow the predictions made by Mark Parrington's GEOS-5 CO forecasts remarkably well. The aircraft is due to land in Halifax around 1800Z or 1500 local time.

Andrew Elford uploaded a picture of the first ozonesonde launch for the BORTAS-B campaign to the BORTAS facebook group yesterday and it is also shown below. Hopefully we will have some other updates from the ground team soon as they have been working hard for the last few weeks getting everything running and collecting data in the run up to the aircraft campaign.

The first ozonesonde launch of the BORTAS-B campaign which took place at Egbert yesterday.

If you are interested in the data that is being collected there are a few online resources you might be interested in. Information about and data from the ozonesonde launches can be found at http://exp-studies.tor.ec.gc.ca/~bortas/. On this site there is a table containing the dates of launches and under each location links to a data file (labelled D) and a graph (labelled G) so that you can see what the vertical profile of temperature and ozone concentration look like. The Atmospheric Optics Laboratory at the University of Dalhousie has a webpage which links data from the Dalhousie ground station and has recent plots from the lidar, this can be found at http://aolab.phys.dal.ca/data/archive/halifax_2011/. They also have a page that will display live plots from the lidar at Dalhousie and that is located at http://aolab.phys.dal.ca/data/current/. If you want to see where the aircraft is when it is airborne this webpage http://faam.badc.rl.ac.uk/public/gluxe_position/satmap.html shows its current position and also the track it has taken during that particular flight. The GEOS-5 CO forecasts are updated daily at http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/research/eochem/bortas/coforecast.html and the number of forest fires is displayed by the University of Maryland's web fire mapper at http://firefly.geog.umd.edu/firemap/. Of course you can also follow updates on twitter or facebook and keep visiting the blog for news, pictures and more information.