By the time that Friday evening rolled about, the team as a whole had begun to feel the effects of a busy first week of the campaign and were looking forward to spending a quiet night relaxing. Some of the team joined the station staff for a recently begun tradition of "Dip Night". A couple members of the Eureka weather station staff concocted a variety of dips (a ground beef and cheese one, an olive tapenade, and a shrimp dip in this case) and those who joined in on Dip Night spent the evening socializing and enjoying these.
The second week of the intensive phase began Saturday morning with temperatures hovering just below -40 degrees, a wind chill feeling just under -50 degrees, and some ice crystals falling. Just after breakfast the team went up to the PEARL Ridge Lab. While the early morning was marked by some low clouds on the horizon, by the mid-morning the sun had risen above them, and the team was able to take advantage of the 7 hours and 45 minutes of sun up in order to take solar measurements across various instruments. During part of the afternoon some of the team, after ensuring that their instruments would continue to make measurements unaided, went for a short walk near the Ridge Lab to take advantage of the relatively pleasant weather.
Saturday evening began as a much busier affair than usual as new weather station staff arrived to relieve some of the staff that had been up here for several months. After a flurry of introductions the arriving staff began to settle in and the campiagn team, joined by some of the weather station staff that we had gotten to know, decided to watch a movie to whittle away the evening. The new staff slowly trickled into the room as we watched the movie and after it concluded the remainder of the evening was spent sociallising with the staff, new and old alike.
Sunday morning involved bidding farewells to the Eureka weather staff and the CANDAC operators that were departing, and trying to not be underfoot as they finished packing and left to catch their flight out of Eureka. The temperature Sunday morning started at -39 degrees, but during the course of the day warmed to -35 degrees, making today one of the warmest days we've had during the campaign. Unfortunately this was coupled with persistent cloudy skies during the day. The team, minus Emily and Ghazal, went up to the PEARL Ridge Lab in the morning, but no solar measurements could be made. The afternoon was spent by the team going for walks; some of the team went for a short walk, the others went on one lasting about 2 and a half hours. Finally over the past few days a pair of musk ox decided to stick around the weather station and so we've had a number of opportunities to observe them from closer than what one might typically expect.
Kristof, Pierre and Peter reinstalled the PEARL-GBS dome on Saturday morning, and the instrument has since been working well. As the sun is now high enough, the PEARL-GBS took the first MAX-DOAS measurements of the campaign. Kristof has decided to replace the PEARL-GBS Netcam used for solar tracking with a new camera on a more stable mount as soon as the weather allows.
Paul spent Saturday taking solar measurements with PARIS-IR, taking 31 of these in total. Paul also spent time processing the data measured over the first week of the campaign and setting up backups of the data On Sunday due to cloudy conditions Paul took N2O test cell measurements with PARIS, making a total of 2 of these over the course of the morning. Tomorrow Paul will make another batch of N2O test measurements in the morning, and will then take solar measurements of the rest of the day.
On March 3rd, CRL made 17 hours of UV measurement. Emily's biggest success on Saturday was getting the green laser to fire. After arriving at the lab and finding that the overnight leak test was successful, Emily flushed the system with deionized water and replaced the DI filter in the cooling system. After this she performed an inspection of all of the internal optics of the laser, and then verified the internal alignment and the alignment of the beam with all other transmitter optics. The laser power results were very good: 3.35 Watts of green light! Thus the "green beam" has returned to the Eureka night sky. Measurements were started with all lidar channels, visible and UV. On March 4th, almost 14 hours of only-UV measurements were made, plus another 3 hours of measurements with both green and UV lasers.
Ghazal and Alexey had a smooth night on Saturday and Sunday. They started their measurements at 21:30 and they stopped at 5:30 on the night of March 3rd, and they measured from 24:00 until 5:00 over the night of March 4th.
On Saturday Gurpreet uploaded a new macro to SPS to make it capable of making continuous measurements independent of MAESTRO. After running it through a battery of tests on Saturday and Sunday he discovered some issues in the new code. Gurpreet will begin debugging the code tomorrow.
Saturday morning, Erik and Sébastien started with another measurement of laser signals with the CaF2 and KBr beamsplitters. Clear sky conditions allowed for 74 MIR measurements to be taken during the rest of the day. Since Sunday was overcast, Erik and Sébastien prepared the Bruker 125HR for HCl and HBr cell tests to be run remotely from the weather station.