The first full night and day of work at AStrO/PEARL...

We were greeted at breakfast by good news from Michael, Richard B. and Richard M. They got the laser running last night and took lidar measurements from 11 pm until 6 am. The inital laser power was 51 W. One of the tasks for this evening is to get the DIAL software working so they can find out what the results were.

Most of the day was spent unpacking and setting up the campaign instruments at AStrO/PEARL. I found that PARIS had mostly survived its trip. However, one of the doors on the instrument lid appeared to be unproperly locked down for shipment. This caused the door to rub against the insulation box and then the bits of foam and particle board fell into the instrument. This meant I got to spend a lot of time vacuuming debris off of the optical bench. Luckily, the optics did not get too dusty. Later in the afternoon, Keeyoon backed up the test data that was on the instrument's hard drive and prepared for the calibration measurements which will be made tomorrow morning.

After the emergency "dome" building experiences that Annemarie had last year, she decided to plan ahead this year and bring all the construction materials she would need. New domes and platforms will be built for both the grating spectrometer and SAOZ (including removable windows for easy frost clearing). Annemarie's first task was to remove the old platform in the DOAS hatch. She found that by removing one bolt the entire platform basically collapsed onto her head. I went up to try and catch the pieces but chose a very tippy lab bench to use as a boost to get up to the scaffolding. Luckily, Jennifer is very quick and was able to catch the bench and save two laptops (and me) from hitting the ground. Next, Clive and Annemarie put the platforms together and installed them in the hatch. The final step was to decide where to put the window in the "dome". This year Annemarie chose to "beautify" her dome with bright red paint. Keith says it goes very well with AStrO!

Richard M. is trying to keep up on both day (DA8) and night (DIAL) activities. He has found that his experience as a parent of two young children has prepared him to function on minimal sleep. His task for the day shift was to start aligning the DA8 and he made some progress toward this end.

Paul, the AStrO/PEARL operator, fixed a very drippy shower head which was quickly draining the lab's water supply. Overnight it drained half of the water out of the tank. So it was really more of a steady flow than a drip! Paul and Keith started cleaning up the lab - taking inventory, giving the floors a good wash...

Jennifer uncrated the SPS and started putting it through its paces. An initial checkout was completed and calibration activities will continue tomorrow. MAESTRO testing will be started tomorrow as well.

There was a flurry of excitement at about 3:30pm when Keeyoon came running from the FTS lab saying that he had spotted the wolf pack. They came right up to the lab and surveyed the site like they owned it. This was quite a sight because no one could remember seeing any animals up near AStrO/PEARL except a fox. We ran into them again in the road when we were driving back to the weather station.

A Match program ozonesonde was launched tonight with the synoptic radiosonde. It only got to 12.9 mbar! Mike (the MetTech, who launched the sonde) won by coming closest with a bet of 7.9 mbar. He used the results from the last two radiosondes (that didn't get very high) to aid his prediction. Or at least that is what he told us...

Best regards,
Kaley.