A clearing trend?...

Finally, Richard B. had a night with no measurements! He stayed at the Weather Station because of the snow. There was about 2 cm of snowfall overnight which would not have been too good for the lidar telescope. With this turn of events, it was suggested that perhaps the "good measurement karma" has switched from the night shift to the day shift.

When we arrived at the laboratory, the wind seemed higher than yesterday and the temperature had dropped. We are now at -37C which is about the same temperature as the Eureka Weather Station. I cannot give an accurate report on the wind speed because that component of the AStrO weather monitoring system is not working reliably. The best I can say is that it is rather unpleasant to stand on the roof with your face to the wind.

The drop in temperature caused a small problem for the MAESTRO instrument. It had been put outside at -24C and was working fine yesterday at -28C. However, this morning, a little mechanical persuasion had to be applied to the filter wheel to get it moving. Since the SPS is operating fine at the lower ambient temperatures, Clive is considering using one of the heaters that is not needed for the SPS in the MAESTRO to prevent the filter wheel motor from freezing up again.

The day was not so successful for the solar instruments. The sky overhead had cleared but there was a thick bank of cloud on horizon which built throughout the day. The Sun nearly made it to the top of the clouds but never made it any higher. We attempted some measurements with PARIS and the DA8 but there was so little radiation getting through the clouds that the gains had to be turned up to maximum and even then the spectra were not usable.

The lack of Sun provided an opportunity for a visit to an iceberg which is trapped in the fjord. Keith, Keeyoon, Annemarie, Hongjiang, Tobias and I went on this little expedition. We took the truck down to the edge of the fjord and then walked about 550 m across the ice to the iceberg. The main goal of the expedition was to collect some "10,000 year old" ice. It turns out that one has to be very careful when collecting the glacier ice as some of the chunks collected from around the iceberg turned out to be sea ice and not fresh water. This provided quite a surprise to Tobias and Keith as they were enjoying their after dinner whiskey. We lasted about one hour outside - basically until everyone either ran out of film or their cameras got to cold to operate.

The daily ozonesonde was launched at 23:15 UTC by Andre and Chris. They used a Raven balloon which reached 7.6 mbar (31.4 km). Andre (with some help from Clive) has been trying different methods of heating the ozonesonde to keep it from freezing during the ascent. Based on Jonathan's analysis of the data, it appears that the heaters really only need to be used for the Raven launches since the ascent rate is for these is much slower than for the Totex balloons.

Best regards,
Kaley.