OTREC timeline
Sitting at a lookout at the Condovac Hotel in the Guanacaste province of Costa Rica, the scientific staff base for the OTREC field campaign, memories of the OTREC timeline came to mind. It has been years in making and on Aug 5, 2019, was the official start of the field campaign which will collect observations to be studied for years to come.
Condovac Hotel outlook view at dusk. The convective cloud in the left part of the photo
reminds me of the OTREC goals, why we are here: to investigate organization
of convection in the Eastern Pacific and the Caribbean.
The OTREC field campaign was originally devised by David (Dave) Raymond and Željka Fuchs-Stone from the Climate and Water Consortium at New Mexico Tech (NMT). Željka recalled how the OTREC idea was born, in a conversation between her and Dave, a conversation filled with vision and inspiration; a field campaign aimed at understanding convection in a region notorious for lack of our understanding how convection works there, and where models fail to predict accurately—the Eastern Pacific. The dream was born, the proposal was submitted to NSF, and after years of meetings and proposal refinements, OTREC was accepted to be funded by the National Science Foundation. We got the news during the American Meteorological Society (AMS) David Raymond Symposium, in honor of Dave’s contributions to our knowledge about tropical meteorology and dynamics.
The year before the scheduled OTREC 2019 field deployment was busy with preparations of the UCAR field catalog, and the NMT supplemental field catalog for the 2018 dry run. A dry run is a rehearsal of collection of already available data, a way of testing our scripts and data plotting routines to prepare for the 2019 field deployment. A dry run is meant to iron out any kinks in our data collecting process. The 2019 UCAR and 2019 NMT field catalogs are running and producing figures our scientists will use in later research and on site decision making processes.
Final field preparations were ongoing in March of 2019, when we met at the Boulder UCAR/NCAR facilities to discuss the transport of instrumentation to Costa Rica and any other field related logistics with our NCAR project manager Pavel Romashkin. We also discussed the deployment of the Gulfstream V NCAR research aircraft with the pilots, and detailed the issues we might run into during our flight patterns.
The OTREC group March 2019 Boulder meeting. We discussed transport of instruments, dropsondes, and radiosondes, and the deployment of the Gulfstream V aircraft to Costa Rica.
The OTREC group March 2019 Boulder meeting participants.
A final touch for the field project was the all important logo, which will follow OTREC on its journey. Living in New Mexico, USA, Zeljka and Dave wanted to use the Navajo symbol for rain in the OTREC logo, and after many, many iterations, the final logo emerged, inspired by earings Zeljka's husband Bill Stone made for her birthday. You can see the final logo below.
The first draft of the OTREC logo in the Boulder snow (left), and
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