Subject: Cascades2 report for Fri evening, Feb 27/28.

   In for winds, but no solar wind...much discussion of
the possible correlation between the solar wind and
tropospheric winds...they surely seem highly correlated!
We are told by those who should know that the amount
of Poynting flux that would be needed for the solar
wind to start shoving the atmosphere around would
be "disturbingly a lot".  But we certainly do seem to get
a lot of activity when we're out for winds, and nothing
much at all when we're not...we call this the Petter Dragoy
effect, for the Andoya Rocket Range windweighter. 
   At any rate, no launch tonight.  We'll see what the
solar wind (and the weather) brings us tomorrow.
Kaktovic was clear tonight, and Toolik was in a blizzard
(with their windows blowing out again), the opposite
of last night.  They used "a couple of kilos" of tape 
to hold it shut.   This is one of the reasons we've chosen 
Toolik as an alternate ground site to Kaktovic, they often
have opposite weather patterns so that if one is down,
the other is good.
   Early in the evening, almost before the window opened,
we saw a westward surge from Canada that brought some
activity over Kaktovic;  and towards the middle of 
the evening there was a "very wimpy" (the official term)
substorm over and north of Kaktovic, but neither event was 
anywhere close to the scale of event that we can use.
The solar wind stayed stubbornly northward all night long,
and faded to boot, with densities below 1/cc much of
the night and the speed dropping from a respectable 700 km/sec
at the beginning of the window to barely 500 km/sec by
the end.  We'll hope for some improvement tomorrow, but
Stereo doesn't hold out much hope until the next day.  But
we've found that we're often a day ahead of the Stereo
prediction, so we'll wait and see.  After this window,
the entire range team will be able to teach a course
in space weather prediction...
   We're all grateful to the continued good cheer of
the balloon-launching and tracking team;  they're having
fun launching one windweighting balloon after another,
and the 3-2-1-RElease on the intercom is a cheerful 
background music to our waiting.  And Bob remembered to 
pull his attenuator during BERTs tonight!  They're getting 
a lot of practice....