From approximately -28℃ around midnight, the temperature rose to -22℃ at 9:30-10:00 am during early hours of the day. The Wind speed dropped slightly from midnight to 8 am, only to pick up afterwards with gusts up to 16 m/s around 10-11 am. This resulted in blowing snow similar to the previous day.
The team left slightly later than usual today. After enjoying a few minutes outside and discovering that Eureka actually has a bus stop, the team split up and Pierre, Kristof and Sébastien took off to arrive at the Ridge Lab at about 9:30 am. Since the water truck had a flat, Peter left even half an hour later, giving Erik and Ellen the chance to go for a stroll around the station. Rather close to the building they came across tracks in the snow which were probably left behind by the wolf pack spotted at the dump earlier during the week.
Erik, Sébastien and Ellen decided to head out for a 20 minute walk around the Ridge Lab at 3 pm. Even though the temperature itself wasn't as low as in the morning, they experienced severe cold due to the rather strong winds on the ridge. They were rewarded with stunning views of the beautiful Arctic again, nevertheless.
Sébastien and Erik took advantage of a second cloudy day to run a N2O cell test measurements with the Bruker 125HR. They first performed a background measurement with no cell in place. The instrument was then vented and the cell was placed in the cell holder before being evacuating the instrument. Afterwards, a measurement was made with the cell in place. Erik is currently working on processing the results of today's N2O cell test and yesterday's HBr cell test. Sébastien and Erik also created a new macro file to easily make repeatable N2O cell tests following the existing macro file HBr cell tests. They hope to resume solar mid-infrared measurements again tomorrow if weather permits.
Kristof and Peter spent their day troubleshooting the PEARL-GBS sun-tracker. The tracker motors and controllers proved operational, so they moved on to test the multitude of cables and converters that lead from the tracker laptop to the sun-tracker. After a long day and with support from Toronto, they finally found thecause of the problem: a broken ethernet cable and some wiring issues. Kristof performed successful tests with the new cables using the UT-GBS sun-tracker, and hopes to bring the PEARL-GBS tracker online tomorrow.
Ellen decided to give PARIS-IR a day off and instead turned to process the data collected until today. She attempted to convert the interferograms to raw spectra. Unfortunately, the conversion for the several measurements wasn't successful - a problem she intends to tackle within the following days. However, she was able to get the plotting routines running so she and the team back in Toronto can have a look at the results of the measurements.
The CRL had a good day on 2 March UTC. It made atmospheric measurements almost all day, with a 40-minute interruption because of high winds just after 17:00 UTC. There were nearly clear skies until 14:00 UTC, at which point cloud structures became visible. These were first extending from 500 m up to 1 km altitude, and by midnight UTC had reached thicknesses of nearly 4 km.
Due to another night with strong winds, Ghazal couldn't perform measurements with the DIAL lidar during the night from 2 March to 3 March. However, the upcoming night is looking better in that regard.
The ozonesonde launched today was a so-called 'Raven' which rises at an even slower ascend rate then the balloons used during the intensive phase of the campaign so far - 199 m/minute for this particular one. It was launched at 6:15 pm, as usual, and was again successful, making it to a maximum altitude of 31523 m.