It’s been a busy day for us here at Eureka. Tonight is the official start of the International Polar Year (IPY, which is actually two years), so as soon as I finish writing this I’ll be joining the team in celebration. It was also the day of one of our closest passes of the ACE satellite, so we moved our normal ozonesonde launch ahead to 18:30UT to match measurements as closely as possible. It was a very successful launch, getting to 8.6 hPa (32km). And the best news of all, we actually saw the sun! Admittedly the thin cloud lingered all day, so some of FTIR spectra were far from optimal, but we unanimously agreed that some data was better than none.
For the rest of the crew, things went along much as normal. Blowing snow caused some drops in intensity in the SPS, and to a lesser extent, MAESTRO, data as their observation windows filled with snow, but these were quickly cleared out. The UT-GBS instruments chugged along as normal, and Clive’s tracker successfully tracked the sun for most of the day in ephemeris (computer algorithm controlled) mode.
Mike has headed up the hill to try for some LIDAR measurements, though that lingering cloud may yet cause him some problems. The cloud again stopped him getting any measurements last night, much to his frustration.
Outside of work, we saw some wolf prints in the snow, but have yet to see an actual wolf, and a crew of 6 turned up for our biggest pilates session of the season.
May the next 2 years be a successful period for polar researchers everywhere, and the next few days more sunny than the last ones! Happy IPY!
Bec