Can we make it up to AStrO?

When we woke up this morning, there quite a lot of blowing snow and Richard B. had not made it down from AStrO. When he finally arrived (after about an hour on the road), he said "DON'T GO!". The road from the lab to the fjord was ok but the road along the shore to the Weather Station was covered in snow drifts. The decision was made to wait until after lunch to see how the weather developed and then make the call on whether to go to the lab.

There was intermittent blowing snow all morning. At lunch, the weather cleared for a while and we considered going to the lab. However, once lunch was done we were socked in again. There was much discussion of whether it was only blowing down at the Weather Station and therefore clear up at AStrO or whether both were socked in. The FTS team decided that 2 pm was the latest time that they could leave for the lab and get at least an hour of data taken. All of this was balanced against how safe Keith and Rai thought the roads would be for driving.

At 1:30pm, Keith said that he was willing to drive up to AStrO. Richard M., Keeyoon, Hongjiang and I wanted to get up to the lab to attempt or check on our experiments. So we all loaded into the truck and started out from the garage. We were no more than spitting distance from the garage (less than 15 m) and the truck got stuck in a snow drift across the road. Keith grabbed the shovel from the flatbed and started digging. The rest of us went looking for more shovels however we did not tell Keith where we were going. He was a bit miffed that we had apparently abandoned him for the warmth of the Weather Station until we came back bearing shovels.

Rai came down in his truck to survey the scene and decided that we needed some help. The digging was progressing fairly well when Geraldine arrived with the front end loader. She hauled us out of the snow drift and part way up to the garage. After this, we returned the truck to our starting point and took all our gear back into in the Weather Station. There is some debate as to whether Keith now holds the record for getting stuck closest to the Weather Station.

After we went got back, Geraldine went out with the front end loader to clear the road. It is probably best that we got stuck when we did since further up the road even the loader was slipping. We would have never made it to AStrO.

AStrO is 14 km away from the Weather Station and there is a difference of over 600 m in elevation. This means that the conditions at the lab are often very different than those at the station. We have a small weather monitoring station at AStrO however the wind measurements are not calibrated (and often are not at all reliable). Also the data is only available if you are at the station looking at the console. While we were stuck at the Weather Station, we came up with a wish list of what monitoring equipment we would like at AStrO. It would be best to have the weather monitoring data available over the web and an all-sky camera so we could make an informed decision on whether to go up to AStrO.

The ozonesonde was launched with the synoptic radiosonde at 23:15 UTC. Charlene had to do some running with the sondes because the wind was blowing when Andre let the balloon go. The Raven balloon reached a much higher altitude this evening (5.6 mbar or 32.9 km). I broke Charlene's winning streak in guessing the maximum sonde height with a value of 6.0 mbar.

The team took advantage of the unplanned "day off" to work on data analysis, homework and a little R and R. We also had to learn to share the single internet connection that we have use of at the Weather Station. This might have been the most challenging part of the day.

Best regards,
Kaley.