Will the weather co-operate this year...

Michael, Richard M. and Keeyoon had a beautiful drive up to the lab last night - until the last 100 metres when the winds really picked up. Michael was able to make about two hours of reasonable lidar measurements before it got really bad. He valiantly continued the measurements in hopes that the weather might improve. Also, we had scheduled an ozonesonde launch (for both ACE and Match) at 2 AM to coincide with the middle of the DIAL measurements so there was added incentive to continue.

The wind at the station increased overnight. By the time the ozonesonde balloon was launched, the wind was at about 15 knots (the maximum for a Raven launch). We heard that there was a lot of running involved in the launch! Keith won the guess the sonde height contest with a guess of 7.1 mbar (expressed as the square root of 2 times the exponential of the golden ratio). This is the first time that a guess involving an irrational number has come close to winning. With the increase in wind speed, the temperature also increased. Yesterday, it was about -41 C and this morning it was -26 C. We also had a lot of cloud. It was not only on the horizon but filled in all day so we could not see any sign of the Sun.

There has been a small change in the working / sleeping arrangements because we now have 9 people on days and one person on the night shift. Since we can only fit 8 people in the truck at time, there were three methods suggested to deal with this problem. We could rotate having someone sleep at the lab, give one person a day off each day, or make two trips to the lab each day. Option 3 causes difficulty at the end of the campaign because no one will want to get to the lab late and leave early because they will want to take measurements for as long as possible. Option 2 is quite difficult because we are still in the process of setting up the experiments. This leaves Option 1. Richard M. was planning on sleeping at the lab to be able to continue working in the day and supporting Michael on the DIAL at night. Keeyoon volunteered to keep Richard M. company at the lab. So they spent the night at the lab, working on data analysis and watching DVDs.

We got up to the lab a bit late because we were waiting for Michael to come back with the truck and for Tom to arrange an interview with CBC North in Iqaluit. Tom was supposed to call at 7:45 AM but it turned out that this was the time that the interview was to start. He was able to reschedule the interview for later in the day once the misunderstanding was worked out.

Annemarie, Jennifer, and Clive used the SPS and a mercury lamp to test the transmission properties of the various pieces of plexiglas that we had at the lab. The piece used on the dome last year showed the expected UV transmission. However, the DOAS and SAOZ dome windows blocked the UV radiation and attenuated the visible signal. It appears that the UoT carpentry shop didn't bother to use the plexiglas that was given to them. Annemarie and Jennifer took apart the window holders and installed the correct plexiglas, sealing it in with silicone. With the new window installed, the DOAS was taking much better spectra!

Keith and I finished the SAOZ dome cover by installing the insulation, weather stripping and window. The instrument is ready to go up on the roof but the winds were too high to be removing the hatch cover and installing the plywood dome. We hope for better conditions tomorrow.

MAESTRO calibrations were completed today by Clive. Jennifer and Clive found that the software supplied with the tracker was not the correct program. It took some time to have the correct version e-mailed from Toronto. They spent the afternoon testing the tracker both inside and outside and it is ready to go. Also, Clive started to get the Brewer spectrometer operating.

After completing some more tests with PARIS, Keeyoon started measuring N2O gas cell spectra to verify the line shape function of the spectrometer. I took the results of the tests over the last days and tried to piece together what we know about the errors. We hope that Bomem will have some suggestions about how to solve the problem. Richard M. has completed the calibration of the DA8 so it and the suntracker are ready for clear weather so they can make measurements.

After lunch, there was growing concern that the weather conditions were deteriorating so we decided to go home early. We left the lab at 2 PM and within 2 hours the winds at the station increased significantly. There was lots of blowing snow and the road is probably blown in along the shore of the fjord. Paul had to ram through some small snow drifts in order to get us home.

Best regards,
Kaley.