Paramaribo Station

The premises of the Meteorological Service of Suriname (MDS), located on the southwestern outskirts of Paramaribo, prooved to be the best location for the RADCHiS obervation program. Although it lies on the edge of a rural environment, pristine conditions dominate as the Atlantic Ocean coastline is just a couple of kilometers to the north, the great Amazone forest a similar distance to the south. A platform mounted on the roof of the building provides an undisturbed view for the instruments, whereas the area behind the building provides all the space needed for a balloon launching site, along with a filling hut. An excellent office space was assigned to us on the second floor, quite close to the observation platform above and with an open view on the launching site.

Fig. 1. the MDS building at the start of the program

installing Brewer no. 159, March 1999

A Brewer spectrophotometer, type MKIII with douple spectrometer, was installed by Albert Maione from SCI-TEC company in Canada. Albert also provided a one week training course for the Operator team. They are shown here below, along with Wouter Peters, the Ph.D. student on the RADCHiS program.

Fig. 2. Brewer no.159, with (l->r) Wouter Peters, Albert Maione, Dennis Rodrigues, Cheryll Ashruf,
Walter Brewster, Ronaldo Lansdorf and Etto Zerp.

The Brewer has been performing regular observations since 15 March 1999, and is programmed to perform the following measurements each day:

direct sun (DS) and zenith sky (ZS) total ozone,

regular UV-scans (286.5 - 363 nm, 0.6nm resolution),

zenith sky Umkehr measurements at sunrise and sunset (solar zenith angle 60 - 90 degrees).

From the Umkher measurements, stratospheric ozone profiles can be constructed.

installing the Sounding equipment, September 1999

During August and September 1999 the sounding equipment were installed by Ismo Kupiainen from Vaisala company, Finland, who also gave a 2 week training course for the operator team. The Vaisala receiver unit sonsists of a DigiCORA II MW15 unit, along with GPS and UHF antenna. The ozon sensor is of the type ECC 6A, connected to the RS80-15GE radiosonde which measures pressure, temperature humididty, and wind - using the satellite GPS technique. A outdoor video camera was also installed, taking wide-angle pictures of the sky every 2 minutes. These pictures are useful to complement the Brewer and sonde observations and, when when combined into an animation, provide insight into cloud transport and turbulence (and are fun to look at).

Fig. 3. Front left to right: the webcamera, GPS and UHF antenna, and the Brewer.

A filling hut was constructed next to a launching site behind the MDS building (fig. 4), all nicely within view of the operator control room (fig. 5)

Fig. 4. A zero-wind test (for GPS) being performed in front of the filling hut.

Fig. 5. View from the operator control room, on the balloon launch site,
Ismo Kupiainen and Cheryll Ashruf looking on.

The first successful ozonesonde was launched on 2 September 1999, followed since then by weekly releases.

Fig. 6. The first balloon sounding at Paramaribo station.