Back at the Summit

2008-02-29 14:49:04.000 – Matthew Morin,  Space Grant Intern

Mount Washington Sunrise.

Hello everyone! Today is one of those days where I had no qualms with setting my alarm clock to earlier than usual. My motivation… a Mount Washington sunrise with virtually cloudless skies and light winds. I didn’t want to miss this rare sight given that the summit is usually in the clouds.

My workload for this week consists of 95% research and 5% observer duties. For research, I’m analyzing ARVTP data with the hopes of making sense of inversions that set up along the mountain throughout the year. I’ve spent the last few weeks learning a new programming language called MATLAB. One of my goals this week is to write a script that puts all the ARVTP data into one file. From there, I will be able to plot the temperature at each site at a given time and get a vertical temperature profile of the atmosphere from 1600 to 6288 feet. Inversions should be easily identified by looking at these plots.

Coincidently, today is a great example of an inversion day. Out of curiosity, I quickly put together a script that plots the temperature at the seven ARVTP sites along the auto road. I found a particularly strong inversion from the base to the 4300′ site at around eight o’clock this morning. Though this is just a preliminary analysis of the temperature profile, I’m very pleased with the results so far.

Matthew Morin,  Space Grant Intern