February 16 2009

First day at PEARL!

Hi Everyone!

I'm Cristen.  I (with help from others at the lab) will be writing the travel diary and updating photos for the website, until Bec arrives at Eureka later this week.

Travel up to Eureka went very well: no lost luggage, no flight delays, no three-day stopovers in Resolute.  Early Saturday morning, Emily, Stacy, Pierre and I dragged ourselves to airports for our flights to Yellowknife.  Since we made it to our hotel at Yellowknife by 3pm, Stacy, Emily and I took the afternoon to explore.  We walked to old-town, warmed up in some art galleries, went out for sushi, and saw some amazing Northern lights on our walk home.  Yesterday, we met up with Constantine, and flew from Yellowknife to Eureka, where we all had relaxing evenings before our first of work.

This morning, Stacy, Pierre, Matt and I made our way up to PEARL, while Emily stayed behind to get ready for her night-time lidar work.  On our drive to the lab, we saw some blurry muscox and Arctic hares through the morning dusk.  There are still a few days until the first sunrise of the year, but we're already getting a good day of twilight.  At the lab, Stacy, with help from Matt & Pierre, got the DA-8. broken down into large boxable chunks and put the scan tube in its case for transport.  Meanwhile, I found the suntracker for the PEARL-GBS to be working well (phew!) and started to test data acquisition techniques for the new MAX-DOAS measurements that I will take this year.  

So far so far we've been lucky: good travel, early wildlife sightings, *and* a good day's work!

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