What's that bright glowing disk in the sky...

The lidar had another great night of measurements with ony minimal cloud. Michael started measuring at 11:30 PM and finished at 6:30 AM. We had hopes that this good luck would continue through the daylight hours.

When we got to the lab, there was some cloud on the horizon that looked threatening. It mostly cleared, leaving some clouds to the east. Richard and Paul warmed up the suntracker at about 11 AM. The DA8 and PARIS alternated use of the tracker to take solar measurements for the next 4 hours. Then the clouds got thicker and the measurements were stopped because the tracker could not follow the Sun. So far, this is our best day for solar measurements. I hope that this is the new trend!

The DOAS and SAOZ had another frost-free measurement day and Annemarie continued her data analysis. Jennifer and Clive had enough sunlight to get the SPS and MAESTRO aligned for solar measurements. Tom and Clive braved the -30 C temperatures after dinner to take a look at one of the Brewer spectrometers at the weather station. They found a broken wire and the instrument should work better now that this has been fixed.

We heard from Richard B. that he made it out of Resolute Bay in style. It appears that First Air miscalculated when they sent the plane in on Friday. As he said in his e-mail, "Two flight crew - $4,000, two flight attendants - $2,000, an empty 727 to get just me out of Resolute - priceless."

The balloon carrying the the ozonesonde did not get very high this evening - only 18.5 mbar. Tom was closest with a pessimistic guess of 14.0 mbar. The met techs usually joke with us that put holes in our balloons right before launch. Now, I am not so sure that they were joking.

Best regards,
Kaley.