As of the evening of Wednesday February 18th, we have assembled the full ACE Arctic Validation Campaign team at Eureka.

The University of Waterloo and University of Toronto teams arrived in the early evening after more than a day of travel (Toronto - Ottawa on Tuesday afternoon and then the scheduled First Air flight from Ottawa to Iqaluit to Resolute and the First Air charter from Resolute to Eureka on Wednesday). The weather was clear until about a hour past Iqaluit and then the landscape disappeared below a layer of cloud. The charter pilots promised us a "beautiful view of cloud" in the dwindling light as we left Resolute and they did not disappoint. It was a long trek and it was good to finally get to Eureka! At the Weather Station, we were given an orientation to the place that will be our home for the next three weeks and we caught up with our MSC colleagues, who had arrived on the Sunday the 15th produce flight. All of our equipment had been shipped up on Tuesday the 17th and had been taken up to the lab already. It seemed as though the charter pilots liked staying at Eureka more than at Resolute Bay - each of the flights to deliver us or our equipment involved at least one overnight stay.

The morning of Thursday the 19th started early (for some) so that Tom and Kevin could get a few hours in the lab before their charter flight left to take them back home. We have such a large contingent here for this campaign that two trips must be taken with the truck to bring the entire team to and from the lab. The first group made it up to the lab the overlap with the end of Richard B.'s lidar measurements. The laser for the lidar has been resurected and is performing well. After a morning spent unpacking and setting up instruments, we saw our first Arctic "sunrise" at lunchtime. Up to one quarter of the Sun was visible (thanks to refraction, since it was at -1.4 degrees to the horizon and also us being approximately 600 m above sea level) for about forty minutes.

Annemarie spent the day setting up the DOAS instrument and performing resolution checks and focusing the CCD array. It was successful and she will move on to the signal to noise tests tomorrow. Clive and Hongjiang had mixed results in setting up the SPS and MAESTRO instruments. The good news is that the SPS is taking measurements with a very low noise level for the visible signals. The bad news is that the suntracker has decided it doesn't want to work. It was operating fine inside the building but when taken outside it stopped working and after that refused to work at all. Currently they are turning the SPS every half hour to maintain the proper alignment. PARIS survived its trip to the Arctic! We set up the instrument on its platform and did some alignment and parameters testing with the globar and the Sun. Richard M. was able to get the DA8 suntracker operating for a good portion of this time that the sun was up and Keeyoon and I were able to do some preliminary solar alignment checks with PARIS. Some modifications will be needed to get the height right. These will be made on Friday after a second set of solar alignment tests.

Our high at AStrO was a balmy -35C. Tobias is the self-appointed photographer for the ACE Validation Campaign so I will share with you some of his pictures of the campaign so far. We are working on a website to allow you to have a view on our activities up here in Eureka. More details to follow on this...

Best regards,
Kaley.