Flight on 3rd of May

Thin clouds that are barely visible
on the satellite image (NASA
MODIS-Terra, 3 May 2012)

On the third day of May, our flight brought us to a very low and shallow cloud deck over the sea ice of the Beaufort Sea. We had taken the coordinates for our flight destination from cloud forecasts and satellite images, but by the time we arrived at the location where the cloud should have been, all we saw was the sea ice and a blue sky. So we kept going north (whither the cloud was withdrawing), and soon we could see first patches of clouds. We cannot go into a cloud when it is very low, because the aircraft needs a safe distance from the ground. But with AMALi, our lidar instrument, we knew that the cloud was in fact just high enough to go in. So we scanned the cloud from above for a while, and then went down and flew through the cloud on the same way back.