A rawinsonde lauched about 4 hours prior to the rocket gives a sounding from near surface up to 30 km or so that can be matched to the rocket sounding.
The boat ride took about 25 minutes from Cape Town harbor. The trip left from the newly opened Nelson Madela Gateway, where we also saw seals, penguins and dolphins cruising about the harbor. The trip crossed Table Bay to the island.
The high security prison on the island was where the political prisoners were kept. All the green vegetation inside the prison was not there when it was in use as a prison.
I went to a science team meeting in Kobe for the Regional Model Intercomparison Project (RMIP) for East Asia. My travel included an 18 hour layover in Singapore, which gave me some time to visit that city, briefly.
A. Singapore:
B. The Glory
As the sun rose during my flight from Singapore to Osaka, the sunlight
on the clouds and the plane's shadow created a phenomenon known as the
glory. The plane's shadow appears in the middle of a bright halo of
light.
C. Kobe
Most of these scenes are around Kobe, but I also took a 30-minute
train ride to Himeji, to visit Himeji Castle, a UNESCO World Heritage
Site.
Kruger Park is South Africa's largest national park. It is also one of the world's largest game parks, over 200 miles (350 km) long and roughly 20 - 30 miles wide, in the northeast corner of the country. It covers over 7,500 square miles (almost 2,000,000 hectares), a little smaller than the area of Massachusetts.
Some friends living in Pretoria, Hannes and Miranda Rautenbach, took us there during our last week in South Africa.
A. Outside the Park
There is a rapid elevation change from the interior of southern Africa
(high veldt, approx. 5,000 ft and higher) to the coastal plains (low
veldt). Much of this occurs in a narrow zone known as the escarpment. Near
Graskop is a place called "God's Window" that gives a view of the low
veldt from above the escarpment.
B. Kruger Park
Saw lots of elephants and many, many, many impala - but none in these pictures
I went to a science team meeting of the Assessment of Impacts and Adaptations to Climate Change (AIACC) project, held at the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) headquarters in Nairobi. Most of these photos are from a day trip to Lake Nakuru National Park, down in the rift valley, and along the way to/from the park. One of the hightlights of the lake were the thousands and thousands of flamingos in the waters along its shoreline. My photos don't do justice to the view of them and their murmuring, which you could hear over a half a mile away. We also got a beautiful view of the rift valley from the top of the escarpment, the near cliff-like drop in terrain from the Kenyan central highlands to the valley.
