The clouds teased us this morning. We woke up to a mostly clear sky – a hint of colour, a few stars. We raced into the lab and filled our detectors in great expectation. The sun was due to rise at 10:36am. At 9:30, the clouds moved in, thickening to pure white again. Strangely enough, we had another fun day of making cell measurements. In the UV-Vis lab, things were marginally more eventful. A few tracker issues kept the SPS/MAESTRO team out of trouble, though they tell me that these are (probably) now resolved, and a loud start-up of the aerosol mass spec pump had Clive jumping out of his skin. The UT-GBS and SAOZ instruments again ticked along perfectly.
Today was also the first day of our ozone-sonde campaign. Bets were taken as to what height the balloon would get to, and most of the team showed up for the launch. Unfortunately a gusty wind which we hadn’t seen since we’d been here also arrived just in time for the launch, making it a really hard release. Data stopped flowing at the very low height of 430mB, probably due to a problem with the sonde, which was a little disappointing. Paul was the winner of the pool, with his bet of 7.7mB our closest guess. Hopefully the wind will at least blow away the clouds!
Bec