1 March 2011

The Sun is back!

After the intense winds yesterday, the road to the lab was cleared by the heavy equipment operator, Mark. As a result, we spent the morning at the weather station. Luckily, it was still cloudy at PEARL this morning so we didn't miss out on any measurements!

The vortex is maintaining its oval structure while centered on the pole. Ellesmere Island continues to be well within the vortex extent throughout the atmosphere. It appears that the colder core of air within the vortex is beginning to shift towards Eureka. Temperatures in the vortex over Eureka are currently around 195 K. We'll be watching this trend along with ozone maps over the next few days.

Both FTSs acquired solar measurements this afternoon. Even with thick haze on the horizon, the signal was strong enough, and the Bruker acquired 23 spectra. Rodica and Joseph began with manual acquisition, and then used the automated macros. The macros worked well and they're looking forward to a full day of measurements tomorrow. PARIS-IR continued measurements this afternoon as well, recording 19 spectra during the afternoon. Lin and I attempted to set up data backup to the CANDAC server but ran into some issues with the Ethernet port. We are currently exploring other options and expect to have this issue resolved soon.

Today Xiaoyi worked on disabling the mechanical slit of the UT-GBS. In addition to this, Cristen and Xiaoyi removed the tracker dome from the roof. With a lot of help and advice from Alexei, Paul, and Volodya, they added plastic to the dome to prevent water leaking to the instrument. They would both like to thank Alexei, Paul and Volodya for their help and advice. Quoting Cristen, "They were real lovely!"

Volodya has continued his detective work to figure out what causes the daily overnight SPS computer freeze. He'll be testing another hypothesis tonight. Other than that, SPS is working fine. Brewer #007 still has some COM port issues and as soon as Volodya has time and the weather is good *at the same time* he'll attempt to fix that. Other Brewers continue to operate normally.

This evening, our ACE ozonesonde flight was successful! John and Matt launched a Raven balloon at 6:15 local time and it burst at just less than 25 km.

Cristen, Joseph and Rodica took advantage of the still (relatively) warm temperatures and went for a walk after dinner along station creek. Unfortunately, there were not any further animal sightings but we're keeping our fingers crossed!

Felicia