The big news of the day - we saw some wolves!!!! But I get ahead of myself....
We awoke to yet another gorgeous sunny day. The absence of the lidar
team, Rodica and Clive made breakfast seem a little empty! The ACE
campaign team is now small enough to fit into one truck, and the lab
too seemed very quiet without them.
Measurements went smoothly, with the UV-Vis instruments working well,
and the FTSs accumulating 18/17/45 Bruker/DA8/PARIS measurements
through the day. A large cloud turned up out of nowhere, right in front
of the sun, at about 3 pm and quickly grew, cutting the measurements
off abruptly.
Matt started the liquid nitrogen generator up, and we're now getting
used to the rhythmic thump thump thump thump as air is compressed and
cooled. Liquid nitrogen is used to cool the FTS detectors so that the
signal is not swamped by infrared noise.
In the data analysis world, Cristen has her NO2 retrievals
working smoothly, and is now working on BrO from her direct sun
measurements. Mareile has been retrieving ozone and NO2 from
the SPS data, as well as continuing work with Tom to optimize the
amount of data coming out of the MAESTRO/SPS combination.
After a slightly windy launch of the evening ozonesonde (which reached
8.0 hPa, 32127 m), Mareile, Cristen and myself walked up to the
airport, and along the runway towards the rubbish dump. It was cold
(-45C), a little windy (~5 knots) and getting dark, but a beautiful
night for a walk. We spotted wolf tracks on the road on the way up,
some in negative - suggesting they'd been past before the wind blew the
loose snow away, leaving raised outlines of the tracks. A Hercules was
due in, and we were keeping our eyes open for the plane. As we neared
the end of the runway, we realized that the blurs on the horizon were
moving. Soon we had 6 or 7 wolves running our way. They were big,
beautifully furry and very curious about us. What an amazing
experience! As we headed slowly back towards the station, they kept us
company for about half the length of the runway, staying just a few
meters behind. They were clearly pretty young, and the camera flash
startled them. Unfortunately they weren't quite close enough for good
pictures, but as you can imagine, we were definitely buzzing all the
way back to the station!