"Rabbit! Rabbit! Rabbit!" Sophie gleefully called out. The Ridge Lab team was mid-way through their quiet Saturday morning commute, a short distance from Upper Paradise. The desolate Arctic road was well lit. The sun now rises as we eat breakfast. Sleepiness quickly gave way to excitement, as the rest of the team saw the Arctic Hare that Sophie's keen eye had spotted. The team piled out of the truck, cameras in hand. With photos of our Arctic celebrity achieved, the weekend was off to a good start.
Saturday and Sunday's weather was mostly sunny and clear. Eureka's temperature stayed near -42°C, with 24 km visibility throughout the weekend. PEARL's temperature was similarly consistent, near -24°C.
In the PEARL Ridge Lab's IR lab, Joseph swapped the Bruker's beamsplitter after lunch on Saturday and began taking NIR measurements. He also wrote and successfully tested a more flexible macro he is now using to run NIR measurements. On Saturday, 42 MIR and 46 NIR Bruker measurements were taken. On Sunday, 28 MIR and 35 NIR Bruker measurements were taken. Dan took 44 measurements with PARIS on Saturday and 20 measurements on Sunday.
Over in the UV-Vis Lab, Sophie worked on updating the UT-GBS, PEARL-GBS and SAOZ manuals on Saturday, in preparation for the fast-approaching extended phase of the campaign. The UT-GBS and PEARL-GBS continued to work properly. Sophie also wrote a brief English manual to help people use the French-language SAOZ laptop.
On Sunday, Sophie removed the shutters of both instruments. This was intended to help avoid any loss of measurements while there are not any operators on site. This could occur if the shutter fails and stays closed. The plan is to leave the UT-GBS and PEARL-GBS running measurements until next summer. The UT-GBS continues to work properly but Sophie had an issue with PEARL-GBS. The LabVIEW code lost its connection with the suntracker. She will determine what happened tomorrow.
When Paul performed his daily check on MAESTRO and SPS on Saturday, he found the UV channel program was hung. He restarted the instruments, and they returned to normal operation. Paul also went to the roof and cleared frost from the windows.
Down at 0PAL, Sham made a list of things need to be done by the end of the campaign. The CRL took continuous measurements in both UV and Visible channels Saturday and Sunday.