ATom-2 RF08 15 February 2017 Ascension - Lajes
Our eighth research flight travelled north again from Ascension to Lajes on the island of Terceira, the easternmost island of the Azores.
This was our second trip to Ascension and things seemed a lot more familiar, including the warm welcome from the base commander. We knew to expect basic but clean housing on the American Air Force base and we were pleasantly surprised to find a low bandwith wifi set up for us. But the meal schedule still took a bit of getting used to: 4pm dinner seemed a little too soon after 11am lunch!
Our wild donkey and wild sheep friends were around but no sign of any land crabs this time anywhere except on the runway on the afternoon before flight!
After working on the aircraft in the morning, we took some time to hike around Green Mountain, the highest point on the island. At low heights near the water, Ascension is like Mars: there are volcanic rocks and clinka (bits of broken off volcanic rocks) everywhere but no vegetation. It’s hot and extremely dry but the beaches are spectacular! Inland a little, clouds from the Atlantic collide with the mountains to create what’s called orographic precipitation: the mountains cause rain! When the island was discovered by the British, an experiment was started to grow all kinds of crops. This makes for a very interesting contrast where banana groves, concede to grass and then rock as you look down to the sea.
While I failed to see any penguins, I did get to see a giant green turtle lay her eggs on the beach in Ascension! Obviously taking a photo of that at night didn’t work but the beaches were covered in turtle tracks and nests which we saw when going down to the beach for sunset! When we were here in August, the beach was pretty smooth and there were no nests anywhere! If we had landed a day or two earlier, we may have been able to see the turtle hatchlings emerging from the nests at full moon!
As well as having a wonderful stop in Ascension, we also had a very interesting flight up the middle of the Atlantic to Lajes!
Just after leaving Ascension we encountered very fresh pollution from African fires with over 400 ppb of CO (highest we’ve ever measured in flight!). There was dust and fire emissions mixed in together and we sampled this pollution at various altitudes for the first 3 hours of our flight. The chemical forecast from colleagues at NASA Goddard indicated that we would see it but predicted much lower concentrations than we observed. Working out why we had such large differences will be an interesting research question.
After crossing the ICTZ again background concentrations of lots of species increased again just in a mirror image of what we saw going south between Kona and Fiji.
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