Was I not just on a 50-mile round trip boat ride last week? James and I went through Bankhead Lock on the Warrior River…for the video, click here.
Today is another long boat trip for me, but this one is not vacation, but a part of an intensive field experiment today by my employer, the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The Wheeler Lake Breeze experiment has already been underway for a while now. Wheeler Lake is so large…the river is 1.5 miles wide at some points, and 3 miles wide in areas where there are large back waters. The water in our lakes and rivers is sometimes at a much different temperature than the land, up to 20-30 degrees depending on the time of year. During the Spring and Summer when water temps are cooler than air temps, keeping it slightly cooler over the water, a lake breeze sets up, carrying the heavier, cooler air toward the land. This is similar to a sea breeze, except it occurs in both directions from the lake, sometimes clearing out clouds over the lake but creating stronger clouds on each side. Check out this recent MODIS satellite image…you can see the outline of the TN river and Lake Wheeler as clearer, with stronger clouds to the north and south due to the lake breeze coming off the water.
We will be using a fleet of instruments, assembled by UAH professor Dr. Kevin Knupp, to measure the lake breeze today. The new mobile Alabama X-band radar (MAX) will be stationed east of I-65, the MIPS, a mobile unit which has vertical wind and temperature profiling instruments will be near the shore of the lake, along with the M3V, a car that measures surface temp, wind, etc. and logs it every second, with GPS coordinates. To learn more about MAX or MIPS and what we’re doing, go to https://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/mips/. The real-time data page is a lot of fun.
My job, as the experienced boat driver in the group (and the wave/severe storm guy who doesn’t know as much about the lake breeze), will be to rent a pontoon boat at Wheeler State Park (the MMP Mobile Marine Platform), drive it the 28 miles to Decatur to re-fuel and pick up instruments, then to monitor the temperature of the air and water in various parts of the Lake around Decatur and have it recorded with GPS also. Terrible day away from the office.
Actually, it was 96 in Decatur yesterday, and I could see 98 today, so it will be hot. But, we’ll be ready with ice, river water, and sunscreen.
More on this later, with plenty of pictures.
