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Considering what transpired on this and previous days, it was obvious that this experiment wouldnot <br />work without the use of GPS navigation and SF6 gas. Without them, there would be no hope of reliably <br />knowing when the aircraft was in the treated volume. The new Rosenfeld pointersystem, which worked as <br />intended, was enormously helpful in this regard. <br />8.2Results of May 25, 2005 <br />Operational Overview <br />(All times are GMT) <br />This was research flight #10 on May 25, 2005 from: 23:00 – 01:45; 2 hr 45 min <br />The mission objectives were to practice salt powder seeding and SF gas release. <br />6 <br />th <br /> The project weather was quite active on this day. During the evening of May 24 a mesoscale <br />convective system MCS formed and moved through southwest Oklahoma and continued moving southeast <br />th <br />through central Texas during the day on Wednesday, May 25. In addition, a cold front slowly moved southout <br />of southeast Colorado into northeast New Mexico. The primary outflow boundary associated with the MCS <br />moved into the Permian Basin helping to ‘cap’ the atmosphere due to warm air moving over the cooler surface <br />temps. But a secondary outflow boundary moved southwest out of the northeast portion of the Texas panhandle. <br />The east side of the triple point out ahead of thesouth moving cold front near Tucumcari, NM was the chosen <br />target area for the three SPECTRA II aircraft. Strong convective development, anchored along the mountains, <br />began around 22Z. By 00Z, convective cells began to develop east of the mountains and were moving <br />east/southeast. This is the area in which the aircraft were flown. <br /> The plan was to fly to the south of the cold front at the NW corner of the Texas Panhandle, where it was <br />expected that clouds would be triggered by the approaching cold front. The seeder deployed to Hereford, Texas <br />and waited on the ground. Seed 2, which had conducted earlier cloud reconnaissance, waited in Dumas. Seed2 <br />scrambled Seed 1 and it took off at 18:17 LT (23:17 UT). <br /> Seed 1 flew north and found two lines of TCU parallel to the front and to its south. The seeder took off <br />at 23:33 UT and was flying westward to join the seed 2 seeder. At 23:55 UT Seed 1 joined the seeder when it <br />was climbing westward through 9000 feet under what was considered a good cloud that was part of the first line <br />ahead of the main frontal Cb. At that time Seed 2 was 30 miles to the west at a cloud that at that time had an <br />excellent base for seeding. <br /> When Seed 1 and Seed 3 rendezvoused at 23:55 UT they found a cloud that looked suitable, and seed 3 <br />reported a strong updraft in the cloud. As Seed 1 circumnavigated the cloud to assess its size and to plan its <br />measurements, the cloud grew vertically very vigorously andstarted to connect to the neighboring clouds in the <br />same line, making the cloud a flight hazard. The cloud had to be abandoned and Seed 1 flew farther west <br />between two vigorously growing cloud lines, escaping through a narrow gap in the cloud line on the left (south). <br />By 00:15 UT cloud 1 had arrived to the next cloud line that had formed farther to the south, where seed 1 had <br />wanted to qualify a cloud. At the same time the cloud base airplane had not found a suitable cloud base, soboth <br />35 <br />