ATom-2 RF03 01 February 2017 Anchorage - Kona
Our third research flight brought us from Anchorage, Alaska to Kona, Hawaii through both very clean and very polluted air.
We brought warm weather with us from California and Anchorage was a toasty 20-30F (right around freezing). This was much warmer than the week before, which was below negative F! Anchorage has finally experienced above average snow for the first time in a few years and every local I spoke with was thrilled! Boston residents would not be as happy :) In Anchorage, we were stationed in the Fedex maintenance hanger at the airport and the area around the instruments reached 35oC before take off!
For our day in Anchorage, the mountains were shrouded in cloud but on the morning we left we finally saw the mountains behind Anchorage as the cloud descended even further to let the mountains peak through.
After leaving Anchorage we weaved our way through the volcanic mountains of the Aleutian Islands. We descending to 12 feet over the runway of Cold Bay as we completed a missed approach. A video of the missed approach is available here
After many profiles in which we sampled both clean air and air influenced by Asian pollution, we descended to Hawaii to find the thickest layer of volcanic smog I’ve ever seen. We could barely see Mauna Loa peeking out through the haze. The volcanic smog was from Kilueua, the volcano which is currently flowing into the sea on the south coast of the big island, and the largest source of SO2 in the USA. Unfortunately we couldn’t even see the ground coming into land so I missed that view. We saw large amounts of sulfur in the haze layer but we also saw a surprisingly large amount of organic species, suggesting that local pollution (possibly from the north) was also making the haze a little thicker.
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