It's Julian Day 63 and you know what that means...
This morning there was something missing from the sky - clouds! There was only a little haze on the horizon as the Sun came up. It looks as though our luck is holding for Julian Day 63. We have had excellent skies and good measurements on this day for the last two years.
The charter plane was scheduled to leave for Yellowknife at about 10 AM. So while the pilots were checking the aviation forecast, the ACE campaign team enjoyed their last breakfast together. Tom, Clive and Richard were giving last minute advice and instructions to those who were staying with MAESTRO, SPS and the DA8. Before we left for PEARL, we arranged everyone in front of the display cases to take the campaign group photo.
At PEARL, there was a 3 mm layer of snow over top of all of the instruments on the roof. Annemarie and I brushed off the domes and windows and made sure that the wind could not easily blow the snow back over them. MAESTRO and SPS were working well however they did need a good cleaning to get the snow out of their input ports. Tobias took advantage of the clear sky conditions and aligned the tracker so now SPS and MAESTRO can make direct sun measurements in addition to the zenith sky ones.
There was joy and happiness in the FTS lab. Dejian, Oleg and I made measurements with PARIS-IR and the DA8 throughout the day. For 7 hours, we had skies with a little light haze and no cirrus. We tried the shared measurement scheme I described a couple of days ago and it worked well. This will be continued for the rest of the intensive campaign. The best news of all was that we were able to get through the entire DA8 filter set for 16 DA8 measurements in total!
It was also a day for animal encounters. Yesterday, when Michael and Pierre went to the lab, they got to see the musk ox herd up close. The musk ox ran right along side the truck as they were heading up the hill past Upper Paradise. It is too bad that they did not have a chance to take a picture. So as we drove up to the lab, we tried a bit of reverse psychology. There was a lot of discussion that went along the lines of: "Gee, I hope we do not see any musk ox. I forgot my camera at the station. Oh no, how could we possibly take any pictures of the musk ox? I can't find my camera." It turned out that our hokey plan worked! We saw the musk ox herd as we crested the hill past Upper Paradise. They retreated a bit as we got out the cameras and they formed a circle a bit further up the hill. We got quite a display before they ran out of sight.
The temperatures started to return to normal. They started at about -26 C around breakfast and hit -35 C with the last weather station observation at 10 PM. The 23:25 UTC ozonesonde was launched using a Raven balloon and it reached a maximum height of 6.3 mbar (32.4 km). Annemarie won with her typical irrational guess of 2 times pi (which rounds up to 6.3 mbar).
The first outbound group made it to Yellowknife this evening. Tom phoned Tobias to find out how the day had gone. It sounded as though they had made it without any problems. We'll have to see how the rest of their trip goes tomorrow.
Best regards,
Kaley.