Dedicated followers of... musk ox!
The wind came up last night so Michael had to shut down the DIAL at 3:30 AM to keep blowing snow and ice crystals out of the telescope. It was quite promising when he went up to PEARL earlier in the evening but the conditions deteriorated in the middle of the night
By morning, there was a thick bank of cloud on the horizon and it kept looking worse as the Sun was approaching the horizon. It was a balmy -36C at the station when we left and -31C at PEARL. The temperature is pleasant until you have to go outside on the roof. The wind is holding the flag out straight and I am not sure if we will shred more of the flag.
The musk ox followers had the chance to get closer to their prey this morning. Oleg was able to take the truck up a side road and we got within 30 m of them before they retreated up the hill to form a circle. It might have been the noise from the truck or maybe it was the flash from Dejian's camera that caused them to run. It is amazing how fast they can go.
Tobias produced preliminary SPS slant columns for February 21 and is now fine tuning the processing. Annemarie has been working with WinDOAS and has produced slant column results for UT-GBS, SAOZ and SPS. Once you account for the offset due to the choice of reference spectrum, the slant columns are in good agreement. The comparisons are continuing. In related news, Tom and Clive convinced the tracker to work by the middle of the afternoon and we are waiting to see what happens tomorrow morning.
In the FTS lab, there was enough Sun to track and make measurements. Time was split between trying to get through more filters and beam splitting tests. Richard and I decided to make measurements through more of the DA8 filters. HNO3, O3, NO and HCl were on the list for today. However, because of the cloud layers and mountains, the HCl filter was only partially completed. Signal-to-noise ratios will be calculated from the spectra and preliminary retrievals will be done to determine the impact of the splitting the solar beam between PARIS-IR and the DA8. The observing conditions were variable with both thick and thin cirrus obscuring the Sun as it moved across the horizon.
During our evening commute down to the station, we saw several Arctic hare around one of the antennae for the PEARL communications system. The drive was a little crowded because one of the two trucks (ASTRO2 - the water truck) decided not to start. In the end, two trips were needed to get everyone down. The first trip had 7 people and then Pierre went up to the lab to pick up Paul and Richard. They had had no luck starting ASTRO2 and the truck seems to be quite finicky about starting when it is already warm. It had 2 hours to cool down after it had hauled water up from the station but it appears to have needed longer.
The winds were high (15 knots) at the weather station so the ozonesonde was launched using a Totex 1200 (larger than the standard weather balloon size) rather than a Raven. The balloon burst at 8.2 mbar (31.0 km) so Clive has bragging rights for today. His guess of 2e was closest when converted to mbar (8.15).
All the hockey fans following the Olympics are now depressed. First, it was the Canadians losing to Russia on Thursday and then the Russians losing to Finland last night. There is no joy in PEARL-ville.
Best regards,
Kaley.