Socked in both night and day...
The little bit of cloud, that appeared last night as the Sun went down, got progressively worse as the evening wore on. At 3 AM, Michael called off the cloud watch and went to bed.
By the time the rest of the team awoke, there was thick cloud almost from horizon to horizon. There was a small gap that we thought that the Sun might have been able to peak through. Unfortunately, by sunrise this clear sky had filled in with cloud.
All the cloud meant it was a good time for calculations. Dejian and Richard spent the day doing retrievals from the DA8 and PARIS-IR spectra. Annemarie continued to work with the slant column amounts for SAOZ and the UT-GBS. The agreement between the two seems similar to what was seen last year and she is continuing to investigate it. Tobias and Tom continued to work on processing the SPS and MAESTRO data.
Today, we had the closest ACE occultation. Sunset 13704 was predicted to be within 11 km of Eureka so I moved the ozonesonde launch to 19:00 UTC. This would have put the midpoint of the flight at the time of the overpass. Unfortunately, there were high winds at the time of the launch and the Totex balloon did not get very high (only 35 mbar!). Because the ACE occultation was so close, we tried again at 23:15 UTC. Fortunately, the wind speed had decreased enough that the Raven launch could be done by Heather and Kelly. We were luckier the second time - the ozonesonde got to 7.4 mbar (31.6 km). So Dejian won the contest with a guess of 7.1 mbar.
This evening we celebrated Richard's belated birthday (only two days late) with a wonderful chocolate cake. Thanks to Marj (the cook) for providing the treat! Now usually, Richard's birthday arrives with a storm. I am hoping that the light snow we are having right now doesn't have any aspirations.
There was a temperature inversion so it was warmer at PEARL than it was at the station. However, today was the warmest we have seen, maximum of -25 C at the station and -11 C at the lab. Almost no need for a parka or a sweater - too bad the wind was howling.
Best regards,
Kaley.