First cloud contact

Today the third measurement flight of this campaign took place. We had two levels of clouds in the morning, one at 1600 ft and one at 8000 ft. This higher layer covered nearly the whole sky, while there were only scattered cumulus clouds below, but significantly more than yesterday. Thus, the conditions for cloud formation were obviously different and we tried to analyze that in detail. Means, we flew a similar pattern as yesterday: starting with a transfer to the open sea followed by a vertical profile from 50 m to 2000 m. In the meantime we reached a nice field of Cumulus clouds below us. We went down to the clouds and passed several of them at a height around 1200 m.

To compare with yesterdays flight we went down below cloud level to 1100 ft. We flew a horizontal leg there for approximately 7 min followed by vertical profiles through the transition layer: between 1100 and 2500 ft. Since there was still flight time left, we flew through some more clouds and this time the second higher cloud layer was almost gone. After another horizontal leg within 2500 ft between clouds we flew back to the airport below cloud base.