The race to setup before sunrise...
After an enjoyable (but quite late) evening, we started this morning enjoying brunch at the Weather Station. The team was up to PEARL by noon. The first group saw the wolf pack on our way up. They were walking along the fiord and did not seem to be too concerned with us. They kept their distance but did not run away.
Most of the CANDAC work party along with Kevin and Rai left this morning to fly back to Yellowknife. The CANDAC work was successful. The installation of the meteor radar has been completed by MARDOC and the final tweaks of the communications system were done by Telesat. The two PEARL operators, Oleg and Paul, and the PEARL/CANDAC network manager, Pierre will stay on for the intensive phase of the ACE Arctic campaign.
The setup at PEARL went well aside from a 30 minute power outage in the early afternoon. Power outages have now become a way of life at Eureka. The generator at the lab came on and we had emergency power until the station supply was restored. During the outage, we verified that none of the campaign instruments had accidentally been put onto the emergency power circuits.
In the FTS lab, Richard started the DA8 setup and it will be ready for instrument and tracker testing tomorrow. Dejian aligned and leveled the PARIS-IR instrument on its platform. The preliminary tests showed that it is operational at all resolution settings and the glowbar measurements were comparable to those taken before we left Waterloo. I think that all of his good luck that Keeyoon sent with us is working! Work will continue tomorrow with N2O gas cell measurements.
In the UV-VIS lab, Annemarie set up the UT-GBS and completed the lamp testing. She left it making dark current measurements overnight. Clive continued to work on preparing the SPS and MAESTRO for measurements. He performed the set up tests earlier in the week and set them up on the roof on Thursday 16th of February. The final aligning of the tracker will need to be done once the sun comes up. The hatch covers for SAOZ and the UT-GBS have been installed on the roof hatches and Clive tested the new triple layer plexi-glas windows. There is a small corner of frost in one but the new design is a significant improvement which should eliminate the frost problems we have had over the last two years. I worked on troubleshooting a communications problem with SAOZ. I hope this can be solved tomorrow. Tobias and Tom worked to set up the SPS processing code on Tobias' computer so they can be ready for the zenith sky data.
It was a relaxing evening at the station. Movie night was interrupted by a power failure at about 9:30 PM but it came back soon enough. Campaign life is settling into a routine.
Best regards,
Kaley.