A good day for packing...
The day broke cloudy and didn't get any better. Heather called the skies as 9/10ths covered at 7 AM. I optimistically asked if this was going to improve and she was not able to give me any hope.
Up at PEARL, there was cloud and haze surrounding the lab in every direction. The Sun came up as a fuzzy red-yellow ball which, despite the boasts of the FTS team members, could not be tracked or used for measurements. After comments like "But I could track that!" died down, Dejian and I started packing the PARIS-IR gear.
Annemarie and Tobias updated their raw data folders on the data archive and continued with data processing. Oleg spent much of the day reviewing procedures for the extended phase. I think that by the time I finished with the SAOZ instructions he was past the saturation point. Hopefully he can quickly pass some of this information to Suzy, the new operator who is coming in tonight. I am confident that we are leaving the extended phase measurements in good hands. All of the Waterloo equipment came down to the station at dinnertime and will be stored in the garage until tomorrow.
The day turned out to be a bit more eventful than I have outlined so far. Kelly and Heather came up from the Weather Station for a visit. Annemarie, Pierre and I gave them the "nickel tour" of PEARL and the measurements we are making. They even had the (exciting / backbreaking) experience of helping to put PARIS-IR into its travel case.
The other big event was that my laptop melted down in mid-afternoon. The boot up message was "Operating System not found." My screams could be heard throughout PEARL - "What?!? Nooooooo!". Thanks to the efforts of Jim and Pierre, I have a borrowed hard drive installed in my computer and can get on with reconstructing the outreach program materials with what I could download from the ACE server down South. It appears to be a significant or catastrophic hardware failure. They couldn't find anything on the disk when we tried to mount it on another computer. Many thanks for the time and effort they took to reconstruct my laptop (and my sanity).
The charter flight bringing Suzy (the new PEARL operator), Jeff (a member of the outreach team) and Don (a new MetTech) arrived a little while after dinner. The new arrivals had some supper and then settled in for an enjoyably social evening. The games were in full swing with shuffleboard, ping pong and pool all going at the same time. A good time was had by all.
The penultimate ozonesonde launch was this evening. The Raven balloon reached a maximum altitude of 7.98 mbar. Tobias won with a guess of 10.0 mbar.
Best regards,
Kaley.