Through cloud or haze or sun...
"A very nice night!" is how Michael described the evening's measurements. It was the best night so far for the DIAL with clear skies and very low winds. He was able to measure from 11:30 PM to 6:10 AM. Also, he cleaned the laser optics and was able to increase the overall power by about 10%.
The tracker for SPS and MAESTRO was better behaved today but needed to be reset in the morning. Tom and Clive will continue to track down the issue. Both instruments continue to make zenith sky measurements. The UT-GBS and SAOZ are still thriving in their hatches. Yesterday, Paul turned off the heating in the hatch that is not being used. This has reduced the operating temperatures of the SAOZ and UT-GBS instruments. Now, they are playin' it cool in their domes.
Things were not so happy in the FTS lab. Michael seemed to have used up all of the clear weather overnight. Richard and Dejian spent the day trying to measure using the rest of DA8 filters. Unfortunately, there was a lot of haze and cirrus cloud on the horizon and it was over the Sun's disk throughout the day. It just started to climb out of the cloud at local solar noon - only to back through the clouds. Because of the variable conditions, spectra were measured with only two of the remaining 5 filters. Ah clouds, the bane of our existence!
Dejian completed his preliminary retrieval tests for HNO3, O3, CH4, N2O and HCl. He compared spectra taken with PARIS-IR using the whole solar beam to those taken with approximately 1/3 of the beam. He found that the total columns from sequential differed by up to 2% at most. This difference is on the order of the measurement to measurement variability observed in PARIS-IR results taken at Waterloo. Therefore, beam sharing will work well for PARIS-IR and we will wait to find out the results for the DA8. Richard will be able to complete his calculations after spectra are measured using all of the filters.
In the afternoon, Annemarie, Tobias, Paul and Oleg went tobogganing. They found that there was a little less snow than there had been in previous years. Nonetheless, a lot of fun was had by those people who did not have to monitor their instruments.
The ozonesonde was launched at 23:15 UTC using a Raven balloon. Richard won the guess-the-sonde-height competition with an exact guess of 7.9 mbar (31.2 km). A note on yesterday's ozonesonde height report: for those who were paying attention, there was a typo in my report of Clive's winning guess. He picked 3e not 2e (no he did not cheat).
Best regards,
Kaley.