Day Twelve - We have some data...

Good morning.

Well for the first time on this campaign we have some data. Unfortunately it is not connected to the optics which are yet to have any success. This morning I started the PAMS experiment on the VHF (at 1.4MW) and everything seems to be running okay. Lots of activity, but not much in the way of precipitation into the D Layer which is a shame, but it is early days yet. Quite disheartening to note that there was a very nice ULF wave in the magnetograms a couple of hours ago. Since this experiment is all about studying ULF wave induced precipitation it would have been nice to have caught it, but that can't be helped.

I notice that every so often the arc_dlayer_ht returns some very messy data between 95 and 115 km. I hope this isn't a regular feature. Actually just noticed that it has fallen over so have restarted, looking good now.

I was very pleased to be greeted by clear skies and stars when I left the Hilton this morning. There is plenty of patchy cloud about (turning nicely pink as I speak) but things are look distinctly better. Fingers crossed that this lasts until tonight.

Another pleasant surprise was this. The coronal hole hit right on time. Of course this does not guarantee increased absorption, but statistically, the probability of increased CNA is larger during high speed solar wind. I am also encouraged by the appearance of a D layer in the real time analysis (set to 10 second integration - bit messy but interesting). This is enforced by the disappearance of all data from the digisonde. HF absorption anyone?

The realtime analysis does not seem to be updating to the web. I am not sure why.

All in all, though, it's a beautiful day. Only another 6 and a half hours of radar running to go now...