March 9 2008

Sunshine and soccer

Our last Sunday in Eureka dawned crystal clear and relatively warm (-37 C at the station, -29 at PEARL). Cristen, Felicia, Pierre and I dragged ourselves out of bed, had an uneventful commute, and were up at the lab and measuring by 9 am. It was a beautiful morning, with a hint of a sun-dog and a light coating of hoar frost.

In the FTS lab, after a few start-up hiccups, the measurements went really smoothly. The rapidly rising sun and cloud free conditions gave us some of the nicest spectra of the campaign. We managed a total of 18 Bruker, 19 DA8 and 43 PARIS measurements, packing up a little early to get Pierre back down to finish a job at OPAL before dinner.

Cristen had a very successful morning, getting the PEARL-GBS refocused. It made direct-sun measurements throughout the afternoon, and was set up to change itself automatically to zenith sky measurements at sunset. Mareile and Tom came up shortly after brunch, and also had a productive afternoon working on MAESTRO and the SPS data analysis.

By the time we left, the hint of a sun-dog and blown into one of the best looking ones I have seen. As we reached sea-level, a trace amount of sea fog made the rainbows reach right to the fiord. It really would be tough to find a more beautiful daily commute!

After dinner, and another great ozonesonde launch by Jane and Andre (8.2 hpa, 31982m), Cristen, Mareile and Oleg organized a game of soccer against some of the UNCLOS sea-floor-mapping team. While soccer at -40 sounds like a tough call to me (and the ball was a little hard), they all had fun - and rumour has it that our team won!


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