Everything is up and running now...
Michael returned from PEARL this morning with good news. The night was clear and dark and he was able to run the DIAL from 11:30 PM until 6 AM. We hoped that these good conditions would continue through the day.
SAOZ was installed on the roof this morning. On the way up to the roof, Annemarie and I discovered that the new round case is a lot harder to handle with your mitts on. Tobias had the lucky job of adjusting the platform supports to best line up with SAOZ's feet. The instrument started taking data at about 94 SZA. Thanks to Pierre and Paul for moving the large hatch cover which we are now using to weight down the GBS and SAOZ "domes".
The tracker for SPS/MAESTRO decided it needed more attention today. One of the internal cables got caught up in the mechanism and pulled the communication pins out. Clive and Tom had great fun outside with the pin puller reassembling the cable. They were quite happy that we have had much lower wind speeds than we had last year.
The UT-GBS had a good day. Annemarie predicts that she will start her preliminary analysis tomorrow. So far, the frost on the window does not seem to be a problem this year but she will continue to monitor the situation.
There was about an hour of usable sunlight for the two FTSs. The sky conditions were pretty good with only a few thin bands of cloud across the Sun. Richard, Dejian and I started testing a new beam sharing method to enable us to measure simultaneously. A pickoff mirror took about 1/3 of the solar beam and directed it into PARIS-IR and the rest continued into the DA8. There seemed to be no lineshape issues when the pickoff mirror was installed. Now we have to look at the change in signal-to-noise ratio of the DA8 spectra. We will continue to test this tomorrow, sun-permitting.
We were enjoying almost 1.5 days without a power failure when the lights went off during dinner. They came on relatively soon. The station staff had thought that they understood what was causing these problems. Now they are back to square one.
Best regards,
Kaley.