Saturday, October 29, 2011

A quiet day

Sunrise was at 0552 am at Hithadhoo today. No rain, a few isolated thunderstorms far away from the S-Pol site, our field office. This was a quiet day. Sunset was at 0555pm. 25 minutes before sunset, I left Container 9 beginning to ride the bike back from S-Pol to the resort. Today I started to use the bike that Eric left me. At the leaving time I took a picture of our container and the weather radar. Radar is obvious in the picture below. I labeled the Container 9 and lightning rods. Members of modeling groups, Smart-R people, and other visitors sit in Container 9.
Lighting rods are all around S-Pol. What's interesting is they are seldom used, because there are virtually no lightning since the beginning of DYNAMO. There are plenty of thunderstorm and rain, but no lightning. That's odd. Where is lightning? Look at the picture here:
This is a satellite image I borrowed from the DYNAMO data catlog. On top of this infrared satellite image of clouds are many purple plus signs; they are lightnings at 2am Oct 23. Plenty of them at Arabian Sea, but not at S-Pol, 0.59S, 73.1E. This is the typical situation of lightning over these days. Why this is happening is a mystery to me.

On my way back, I took another picture, 5 minutes ahead of sunset:
In a quiet day like this, we have little to expect from the radar screen. But chances to spot clouds are still plenty in a tropical island. 25 minutes after the sunset I got back in my room, in the dark.

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