Most of the team stayed at the weather station today due to heavily overcast skies, while Kristof and Pierre went up to the Ridge Lab in the morning. Light snowfall didn't cease until after dinner time, but the team, including Peter and Ludovick, decided to go for an extended walk with several steep climbs. Erik and Sébastien had spotted a herd of muskox close to the Eureka runway the previous day and the walking party managed to a nice picture zooming in from a safe distance. Muskox are Arctic mammals which live primarily in the Canadian Arctic and Greenland and, due to their shoulder height of up to 1.5m (5ft), thick fur and long curved horns, are a pretty impressive sight.
Afterwards, the team decided to extend their trip to the dump, where they came across a group of Arctic hare. These hare are well adapted to the Arctic climate and easily blend in with the snowy surface. This turns taking pictures into a real challenge, especially when the skies are overcast and the light is thus very diffuse, almost entirely inhibiting shadows from being cast.
These weather conditions also prevented solar measurements with the Bruker 125HR from being performed for the fifth consecutive day. Accordingly, Erik spent the day verifying the results of the HBr cell tests in LineFit 14. He found that the instrument line shape and modulation efficiency are consistent with those produced by LinFit 9, but the retrieved phase error is not in agreement. Erik believes that this is due to an incorrect parameter setting within the code and is confident to be able to resolve the issue before processing the N2O cell tests in LineFit 14.5.
Kristof spent the morning checking the PEARL-GBS sun-tracker to see whether the pointing followed the measurement sequence. He discovered a peculiar bug regarding the webcam used for active tracking. An adjustment to the camera iris apparently causes the instrument to take an extra zenith sky measurement in addition to the normal sequence. Until the issue is resolved entirely, Kristof applied a temporary fix modifying the tracker code to not adjust the camera.
Since PARIS-IR continues to be out of order, Ellen couldn't take globar measurements, while solar measurements wouldn't have been possible due to the weather anyhow. However, after getting their approval from Kaley, Pierre and Ellen are looking forward to trying to fix PARIS-IR's computer tomorrow.
The CRL started off at midnight on 8 March UTC with the hatch closed due to snow accumulation on the hatch window. During this time, Emily made 2 hours of depolarization calibration measurements. Regular measurements took place from 04:15 UTC to 13:30, under cloudy, snowing skies. The hatch had to be closed again in the afternoon, leaving time for Emily to do some inventory and further calibrations, but was re-opened from 20:00 to 24:00 for additional measurements. About 13 hours total measurements were collected with CRL today.
Restricted visibility prevented Ghazal from doing final alignment tests for the DIAL for another night. Since it stopped snowing shortly after dinner though, she is optimistic for the upcoming night.
Kristof, Ludovick and Emily watched today's Raven ozonesonde launch from the recreation room at the weather station. Met tech Leanne released the Raven right on time, and - due to barely any wind - it rose so smoothly that Met Tech Kristin barely had to move while holding the sonde to keep it under the balloon as it took off. None of the three in the audience have ever seen a weather balloon rise as vertically and straight as this one did. Ravens often have the look of a jellyfish, swimming upward into the atmosphere. This one, however, didn't even change shape, and it stayed right over the launch site until the team could no longer see it. This should provide some really well co-located profiles for comparison with the 0PAL instruments, including the CRL which was operating at the time. The sonde ended up only 142 km southeast from Eureka, on average about 50 km closer than the previous ones, while still rising up to 33177 km at average ascent rate of 200 m/minute.