It’s been another really productive day at PEARL today. SAOZ and the PEARL UT-GBS were both working beautifully all day, and were joined this afternoon by the UT-GBS under a nice new hatch. MAESTRO and the SPS instruments were also mounted on the roof during the afternoon, and will be making their first measurements tonight. Unfortunately for the FTS instruments, clouds blurred the first above-the-horizon sunshine. On the plus-side, there was enough brightness coming from behind the clouds to set-up and lock in the tracker, so we were able to set up our beam sharing arrangement and confirm that all three instruments will be ready to rock when the clouds part. PARIS is now fully-functional, and completed its first cell measurements today. The Bruker cell test measurements from yesterday showed it to be in very good condition too. News was also positive from Mike and the LIDAR – pretty clear skies let him take good measurements until around midnight last night, and the clouds that troubled us today have cleared up giving him another good opportunity for tonight. So far Mike has been the only one of our team to have seen any wildlife – he tells me the Arctic hares love to run towards the truck as he goes up the hill each night.
Checking out life at the station has been fun too. For those of you who don’t know much about it, we’re staying at the Environment Canada Weather Station, which has been in operation since the late 1940s. Typically there are 8 personnel on station at a given time, including 3 meteorological technicians, a cook, handy-person, station manager, a mechanic and a heavy equipment operator. In addition there is always a CANDAC operator or two (currently we have Paul) who looks after all the experiments that CANDAC has running. For this campaign there are also 11 of us science-y types with our assorted instruments, all of which are located at the PEARL laboratory, 15km up the hill from the main weather station. The facilities at both the weather station and PEARL are really nice, making it much easier to work and live than one would think it should be in such a remote location!
Bec