Thursday evening was fairly quiet. Just after 18:00 Paul, Sébastien, and Kristof went outside to watch the ozonesonde launch, and Kristof even got to hold the payload as the balloon began its ascent. After a few hours of work, the team gathered with Eureka weather station staff to watch a documentary about Arctic wolves. The documentary focused on the local "Eureka pack", and the staff's interest was additionally piqued after having met the film crew the previous summer when they visited the weather station.
Friday morning started off at -46 degrees with ice crystals and cloud cover on the horizon. 9 hours and 43 minutes of sun up were scheduled for today. Over the course of the day the temperature warmed up to -44 degrees, but, while there were patches of clear sky in the late afternoon, the clouds persisted. The team tried to make use of the breaks in cloud cover to take a few solar measurements, but for the majority of the day those of us who make solar measurements had to occupy ourselves with other work. During the afternoon some of the team took advantage of the relatively pleasant conditions to go for a short walk along the ridge near the Ridge Lab, and were rewarded with an amazing view across the frozen tundra.
Paul spent the day processing the PARIS measurements that were not yet converted into interferograms and raw spectra. He also began the backup to the CANDAC servers of the newest batch of PARIS measurements and began comparing test spectra to those of previous campaigns. Paul made 9 solar measurements over the course of the day, taking advantage of breaks in the cloud cover. He hopes to continue making measurements if the weather permits tomorrow.
The clouds prevented Kristof from working on the PEARL-GBS netcam alignment today. Since both GBSs were working well, Kristof spent the day analysing the data collected during the campaign.
Over at 0PAL, on March 9th CRL made 24 hours of measurements with both lasers.
In the morning, Erik and Sébastien made use of the break from taking solar measurements to work with the alignment kit again. They used it to take pictures of interference fringes for several positions of the mobile mirror in the Bruker instrument. In the afternoon, the sun briefly came out of the clouds and 10 MIR measurements were taken.
This morning Gurpreet put SPS and its suntracker on the roof with SPS facing in the zenith direction. He ran the new macro on SPS to have it measure solely in the zenith position and found that it worked as intended. SPS made measurements throughout the rest of the day using the sparse sunlight. Gurpreet also began the process of uploading the campaign data to the CANDAC archives, and packing unused equipment in preparation for the end of the intensive phase of the campaign. He plans to continue monitoring SPS performance tomorrow, along with assembling an operations manual for Pierre's use during the extended portion of the campaign.
Ghazal had a smooth night, starting measurements with DIAL at 22:30 and continuing until 5:00.