Clouds and more clouds...

Richard B. ran the DIAL for two hours last night but there was enough cloud that the results will probably not be usable. The clouds cleared somewhat by morning but once again settled on the horizon to the south. There was a break part way up the cloud bank where Richard M. was able to get the tracker to follow the Sun. Unfortunately, in less time than it took to measure one set of interferograms with the DA8, the Sun had gone back into the clouds again.

Clive thinks that he has isolated the problems with the automation of the MAESTRO instrument. There appears to be a problem with the limited buffer size on the instrument itself which causes it to require a periodic reboot when using macro commands. The code is being updated at MSC to circumvent this problem. The fix will be implemented as soon as it is ready and will be uploaded tomorrow.

This evening's ozonesonde launch was done with a Totex balloon since the surface winds were quite high (~25 km/h). The combined ozonesonde/radiosonde did not get as high as any of the previous balloons. It only reached 21.2 mbar (25.18 km). Nine people from the validation campaign team and the Weather Station competed in the "guess the sonde altitude" game. Once again, Charlene had the closest guess with 11.0 mbar. Maybe I should have told people that it was going to be a Totex launch...

It was a bit warmer today, -29 C at AStrO and -33 C at the Weather Station, but the wind was blowing and this made it feel a whole lot colder.

Best regards,
Kaley.