What day is this?

We made it to Diego Garcia! I'm still foggy from the jet lag and keep forgetting what day and time it is. I knew what to expect from the trip, but it was still pretty brutal. I stayed awake for 90% of each flight:

• Denver to Los Angeles : ~2 hours
• LA to Hong Kong : ~15 hours
• Hong Kong to Singapore : ~4 hours
• Singapore to Diego Garcia : ~4 hours

but that didn't do much good in reseting my internal clock once we arrived. There's a chance I might get to go on one of the mission in the P3 plane that is stationed here for DYNAMO. That might be cool, but then again some of their missions last 9 hours! And most of the time they just fly back and forth over the grid taking surface and boundary layer measurements. I'm not too stoked about being on another plane for that long, but maybe there will be a crazy convective outbreak when we get into the wet phase of the MJO and I'll get to go storm chasing in a plane!

Speaking of the MJO...

This is the latest ensemble forecasts of the MJO from the European Center model (ECMWF). Looks like we are definitely in for a decent MJO in the next couple weeks. Most other models predict  a similar increase in amplitude coming up. However, the soundings we saw today at DG were exceptionally dry. Not sure what that will mean for how the MJO will be felt down here at 7 degrees south.

So anyway, lets talk about Diego Garcia! This place is surreal. There are so many things that make me feel like I'm on the set of "Lost"! Gavin made an excellent post comparing DG to the island in Lost that was spot on, so there's no need to repeat all that. Let me give you the tour of what I've seen so far.

Here's my hotel room, which is pretty nice. I wasn't surprised that they had television, because they can easily get that through satellite, but I was surprised to find they had terrestrial radio! I'm not sure if they have DJ's there or not.

This is Heather, who works as a field technician for NCAR. She's had a lot of experience in the field having worked for the NAME and VORTEX projects to name a few.

Here's a look inside the Integrated Sounding System (ISS). This is the "control room" that is actually just a shipping container (crate) that was converted into a room to monitor the data coming in. These are connected to the instruments outside that measure things like winds, surface temperature and solar radiation. They have to keep the computers cool so it always has the AC blasting... which is fantastic.

Here's pictures of Steph and I doing our first balloon launches! Although we realize this is gonna get really old really fast, its still exciting!