Editor’s note: Ernie Lewis, principal investigator for the Marine ARM GPCI Investigations of Clouds (MAGIC) field campaign, sent this update.
It’s hard to believe that the measurement phase of MAGIC is now complete. It seems like just the other day when it all started. It has been an incredible ride, and it has succeeded beyond my wildest expectations. We’ve been incredibly fortunate in many ways. However, MAGIC is by no means over. There is nearly a year’s worth of measurements from several dozen instruments, comprising an unprecedented data set on clouds, aerosols, radiation, and atmospheric structure over the ocean, and scientists will be analyzing these data for quite some time to come.
There will be a MAGIC session at a conference in Washington, DC, in November, and in San Francisco in December. During these conferences, scientists interested in MAGIC data can meet and discuss working together, and how to best use the data to attack certain questions.
MAGIC updates will also continue. I will try to show how the data are being used and the types of questions they address, and I have several topics I want to discuss (polarized light, layers of the atmosphere, etc.) that I haven’t written about yet.
I am also happy to announce that Veronique Perraud, a friend who is a postdoctoral researcher in atmospheric chemistry at the University of California at Irvine, is going to blog about MAGIC. She has a blog in which she demonstrates that “Chemistry isn’t necessarily restricted to the lab and/or classroom, and that it can be really fun, and we can be creative to speak about it.” I fully agree with each of these sentiments. She asked if she could link MAGIC updates to her blog. Thanks Vero!
As a final note, I recently put together a slide show that gives an overview of MAGIC, with pictures of the instruments, the Spirit, living quarters, and the deployment in general.
MAGIC updates will continue, so until next time, when you stop and smell the roses, remember to look up and observe the clouds too!
Ernie Lewis