We are in the last few days of the intensive campaign phase. Thankfully, today has been sunny! The team had to wait for the road to be cleared of snow drifts this morning, and headed up to the PEARL Ridge Lab after lunch. This was the earliest possible time to do so; we passed the snow clearing vehicles on route. The temperature continues to be quite cold: Eureka kept near -37 °C and outside PEARL was -38 °C with a wind chill below -60 °C (winds up to 60 km/hr). Thankfully, the space heaters have kept temperature inside PEARL to about 22 °C, making for a much more comfortable work environment.
Once the truck arrived at the Ridge Lab, the team immediately sprang into action. Dan headed directly to the roof to open the suntracker hatch while Joseph set up the tracker instrumentation and Debora booted up PARIS. By 5 o'clock, the Bruker had collected 18 mid-infrared measurements and PARIS had taken 13.
In the UV-Vis lab, Xiaoyi finished building the power system for UT-GBS and PEARL-GBS. Xiaoyi also rearranged the UV-Vis lab to facilitate connecting both UPS units and three PCs to the new ibootbar. He moved the UT-GBS's computer and UPS up into the hatch, which is now very full of equipment. Xiaoyi discovered the SAOZ instrument has not been working properly since we were last at the PEARL Ridge Lab (two days ago). The GPS unit was again the source of the issue. Xiaoyi disconnected the GPS again and SAOZ is back to operating normally. He also discovered the PEARL-GBS had stopped working yesterday due to a Labview error. After I restarting it, everything returned to normal. Xiaoyi will keep an eye on it to see if this happens again.
This morning near Eureka, Volodya replaced a third cable in Brewer 192, which finally fixed it! The instrument has now been tested, installed and is operating normally on the Eureka Weather Station instrument platform.
Emily joined the Ridge Lab team today to learn how to operate the instruments during the extended phase of the campaign. Today's IR lab training involved practice cooling PARIS and Bruker detectors with liquid nitrogen, setting up the suntracker, and taking measurements with the Bruker and PARIS. Emily's UV-Vis lab training with Xiaoyi included instruction on how to fix the filter wheel and other details about GBSs and the SAOZ. Volodya trained Emily to operate the SPS, MAESTRO and Brewer instruments.
The CRL lidar at 0PAL took 24 hours of measurements today.
Today's ACE ozonesonde flight occurred at 18:15 and reached an altitude of 33,339 m and 5.4 millibars.
With only two days remaining in the intensive phase of the campaign, please join us in hoping for sunny weather this weekend!