By the time the team left the weather station on Tuesday morning, yesterday's light snow had accumulated on the ground, forming small snow drifts here and there. Visibility was poor in the morning and it was hard to make out contours on the snowy road. Yet, the team made it up to the Ridge Lab by about 9:00 am without getting stuck. Today, the whole team, except Kristof, decided to go down to the weather station for lunch. By this time, visibility had slightly improved, even though light snow persisted through all of Tuesday. Only Ellen, Pierre and Peter went back to the Ridge Lab in the afternoon, since Sébastien and Erik could perform computational tasks from the weather station. The ride back down in the evening was very smooth, with greatly improved viewing distance.
Overcast skies and snow prevented the Bruker 125HR from taking solar measurements for the third day in a row. With the HBr, N2O and HCl cell tests complete, Sébastien and Erik turned their attention on processing the cell test measurements. With access to the UofT network restored, they were now able to process the results. Sébastien was able to process the HCl cell test for near-infrared measurements and found that the results were consistent with previous HCl cell tests. Erik was working on processing the N2O cell tests with the latest LineFit version, LineFit 14.5, but ran into some unexpected errors in the code. Erik is working on debugging the LineFit codes and expects to have this completed soon. Sébastien and Erik are hoping for clear skies tomorrow to continue with mid-infrared solar measurements.
Kristof took advantage of the cloudy day by performing standard lab tests for the UT-GBS. The resolution, stray light and polarization tests were completed, and he set up the UT-GBS for dark current measurements overnight.
Ellen and Pierre spent their day troubleshooting PARIS-IR again. It turned out that the internal computer had some serious issues, which they weren't able to fix yet. However, Ellen was excited to discover the instrument in far more detail during this intense troubleshooting day.
The CRL measured from midnight until 21:30 UTC on 7 March. The very light snow which was present most of the afternoon had finally accumulated on the window sufficiently by that point so that the hatch had to be closed to allow the snow to sublimate away.
Due to the snowy conditions and restricted visibility, Ghazal couldn't do final alignment tests for the DIAL during the night from 7 March to 8 March either.
Today's ozonesonde was a Raven again. It travelled as far as 162 km south southeast of Eureka and rose to 32226 m at an ascent rate of 194 m/minute.