The Gulf Wars

What about the Gulf? Well, our group, the Aircraft Operations Center, has been heavily involved in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. We have routinely been flying three of our smaller aircraft, two Twin Otters and a King Air 350ER doing remote sensing of the spill and monitoring the marine mammal situation thee. One of our P-3s, Kermit, has been collecting data on the loop current with weekly 9 hr. flights during which during which vertical profiles of temperature, current and salinity have been taking collected from expendable probes deployed from the aircraft such as you see here being loaded into one of the belly launch tubes on the aircraft. In excess of 60 of these probes are jettisoned out of the aircraft during each of these long missions.

And, our California P-3 loaded with its sophisticated chemistry gear was not overlooked in NOAA's effort to utilize all resources possible to characterize the nature of the spill. Ms Piggy,

as she is so aptly named, was recalled last Monday to fly a series of two missions in the area in and around the spill to determine the quality of the air that would be eventually blowing ashore someplace along the Gulf coast. The plane arrived Monday night, flew missions on Tuesday and Thursday and then returned to Ontario, CA where it is flying four additional flights there to conclude the two-month CalNex project. One of the flights from the two Gulf missions is shown to the left, and Ms. Piggy's departure from MacDill AFB in Tampa, FL on its return flight to Ontario California is shown to the right.

And now we wait. Ms. Piggy will return from California on the 26th of June, undergo a major maintenance inspection and be re-instrumented with all of her hurricane gear to be ready by August 1. We're hoping the tropics hold off until then, but judging from the disturbance noted in the mid-Atlantic this week, the season may come earlier than hoped. We'll have to wait to see.

Next posting will be when something interesting occurs. Until then, I hope you enjoy what's already been posted.