Dropsondes

The dropsonde systems work significantly better than on previous flights. The only sonde that failed during the flight failed because it started to oscillate wildly as it dropped and lost the GPS locked and regained almost constantly during the fall. Since it was in a relatively important location a second sonde was dropped within a few minutes. The FSU Graduate students handled the drops and processing for a portion of the flight

A successful mission in Tropical Storm Debbie today with 23 of the old style sondes and 1 new sonde dropped. We expected lag time in the wind data as the older sondes are a bit slower in achieving GPS lock. What we did not expect were the sondes to not obtain GPS lock at all, which happened at 12:35, 12:37, 13:00, and 13:20 (all times UTC). A short while later we had yet another sonde that was late getting GPS lock at 15:40. However the sonde finally did begin to produce wind data at ~600mb and continued to do so until splashdown.

An excellent mission today with 18 drops. One drop (13:36 UTC) had several GPS dropouts and thus has missing data between 825 and 600mb. One other drop (14:46 UTC) lost GPS entirely and produced no data. A zip file of all SkewT images has been included with this report.