Eureka 2012: Daily Report for 01 March 2012
Shovels, Troubleshooting & Calibration
Last night must have been very windy. The team frequently encountered troublesome snow drifts along the road from Eureka to PEARL. Driving to the Ridge Lab was challenging. Pierre's experienced handling of the truck and our impressive Finnish tires enabled us to get within a stone's throw of PEARL, at which point we had to deploy our shovels and dig ourselves the rest of the way!
The temperature at Eureka kept close to -38 °C throughout the day. The temperature at PEARL in the morning was -28 °C with a wind chill of -37 °C. By the late afternoon it had dropped to -36 °C with a wind chill of -51 °C.
As there were considerable clouds across the sky today, no measurements using the Bruker or PARIS could be made. Debora analyzed spectra PARIS has collected so far, and took background measurements at a higher signal to noise ratio (with 200 scans per spectrum instead of 20). This will improve the precision of the Instrumental Line Shape analysis. Joseph finished the UT-GBS resolution test data analysis.
Xiaoyi performed some troubleshooting on the UT-GBS' shutter, which has been behaving abnormally over the last two days. It is working fine now. Due to an issue with the UDP setting of the new suntracker PC, which has been causing communications to time out, Xiaoyi has switched back to the old suntracker PC. This has enabled the PEARL-GBS to collect data in Zenith-sky/Direct Sun/Max-DOAS mode. He will continue to examine possible solutions to the timeout problem.
Volodya tried to resolve two issues with the SPS and MAESTRO computers today. The SPS computer halts every night and needs to be rebooted. This is the same computer that was used for the SPS during the Eureka Campaign last year (it had behaved the same way). The other issue is a network communication problem between the two computers. By the end of the day, Volodya was able to make the two computers communicate reliably. The Brewers, on the other hand, are working fine.
Over at 0PAL, Emily performed 24 hours (midnight to midnight) of measurements using the CRL lidar. Thereafter, she had to shut the lidar down because the window had become too snowy. Emily has also been working on the operations software.
Today's ACE ozonesonde flight launched at 18:15 and reached an altitude of 30,415 m and 8.1 millibars.