It wasn’t such a good weather day today. Around 8pm last night, just as Mike started up the LIDAR, the wind picked up, reaching over 30 knots at the lab and bringing with it clouds and lots of blowing snow. Sadly this put an end to his observing session. Things weren’t much better this morning. While we did head up to PEARL, as the conditions deteriorated the decision was made to return to the weather station before lunch, rather than have the 11 of us stuck at the lab. On the plus side, we did get to see the musk-ox on the way home!
The afternoon was cheerful as the team gathered with their laptops in the dining room to work on data processing, code optimization and other non-lab dependent things. Asan, who is here working on the University of Waterloo aerosol mass spectrometer, made use of the workshop to make a holder for his 100 micron aerosol inlet pinhole. Through the course of the day the weather improved a bit, though the wind was still too high for the evening launch of a very large plastic (Raven) balloon. Instead our ozonesonde went up with a smaller rubber (Totex) balloon, managing to reach an impressive 6.7 hPa (34 km). Annemarie’s standard guess of 2 pi hPa wins… and Tobias does the dishes!
Hopefully the wind will take the clouds away with it, and give us a better day tomorrow.
Bec