24 February 2011
Measurements!!!
Today was our first day of solar measurements!! Most of the day hovered around -46C at the weather station. The temperature at PEARL decreased throughout the day as steady winds hovered around 15 kts from the north. This combination led to a wind chill of -50C at the Ridge Lab! The sun rose today at 10:58 AM and set at 15:03. There was some cloud and blowing snow on the horizon this morning which led to a delay in the FTS measurements but we managed to measure through the haze for much of the daylight hours.
The vortex continues to be centered on the pole, with its maximum strength at approximately the 550 K theta level. The shape of the vortex is generally circular with some edge filaments scattered across much of Russia. In Canada, the edge of the vortex is aligned with the 70N parallel. In our neck of the woods, the vortex extends across all of Ellesmere Island. With temperatures in the stratosphere hovering around 190K over Eureka, our first measurements will likely be very interesting.
In the FTS lab, PARIS-IR began the measurements at about 11:30AM and obtained 18 solar spectra. In addition to this, Lin continued to analyze the previous day’s cell and background spectra. The Bruker 125HR acquired 19 MIR solar spectra before we lost the sun around 2:30 PM. Rodica and Joseph also measured the background and the HBr cell (50 co-added scans each) in the remaining time to assess the ILS. Both instruments are operating well and the beam-sharing setup turned out to be perfect! We did not have to make any adjustments all day!
In the UV-Vis lab, Xiaoyi and Cristen tested the motors and installed mirrors on the sun-tracker. They did some work on the UT-GBS installing the fibre bundle, reassembling the input optics, and installing the grating. The UT-GBS is now working in the lab. Xiaoyi worked on the set up for the SAOZ data backup. The laptop used to operate the SPS and its sun-tracker was experiencing memory issues so Volodya had to replace it today. Once that was done, SPS continued to measure happily.
We had a relatively quiet evening while Jane and Matt (the Met Techs) launched a Raven ozonesonde in calm winds. This flight was part of the Environment Canada MATCH program. Our flights are scheduled to begin on February 27th.
Felicia