History of GATE (Invited Presentation)

The GATE experiment was a cooperative international experiment preplanned for 1974. In 1973 I was asked to draft the key convection plan and implement it in 1974. I had been on two field programs in Carrizal Venezuela, and had directed the second one. The world’s weather ships were arranged in two nested hexagons centered near 8.5 ^oN, 23.5 ^oW. This was the first time that the Soviet weather ships (with mixed gender crews) had been out of the Arctic (the Baltic and Vladivostok regions). The world’s weather research aircraft flew daily in stacked patterns over the array, and three scientists flew and directed them on a daily rotating basis. The primary three were Alan Betts, Steve Cox (with me at CSU) and Ed Zipser. Typically I would fly on the UK C-130 at 500ft with Group-Captain James, since this aircraft had the best forward-looking radar. I did fly once on one of the two Soviet Ilyushin-18s to see their in-flight data sampling methods. We had seven aircraft in all: including also two French DC7, and two US planes, a NASA 990 and a high altitude ER2. Decisions on flight plans were made at daily meetings the preceding day, based on the operation plans. The center of the array was roughly 1000 nm from operations in Dakar, Senegal, so the flight time of the C-130 to the array is about 3 hrs, Daily mission times were therefore typically of order 10+ hours, so the in-flight management scientists were on a three-day rotation.