After a long day without the ability to make solar measurements due to cloud coverage, on Monday evening some of the campaign team decided to let out some steam and get into the competitive spirit by playing each other in a small ping-pong tournament at the Eureka weather station (without annoying the staff too much with the constant rallying of the ball).
Tuesday morning started with temperatures around -38 degrees and light snow. Throughout the day the snow turned into ice crystals and finally into low cloud cover, obscuring the sun, which was up for 8 hours and 45 minutes, and hindering the ability of most instruments to make solar measurements. The temperature through the day remained steady until the late afternoon when it slowly decreased to -41 degrees. The fairly stable weather was taken advantage of by Emily and Ghazal who took a walk on the fjord in the afternoon. The skies finally cleared up in time for them to watch the sun set over the hills. They reportedly enjoyed hearing all the different sounds that the ice made as they walked across it.
Gurpreet allowed SPS to run today and take measurements, despite the cloud cover obscuring the sun, in the hopes that a small portion of the data might be useful. He will continue to take measurements with SPS tomorrow and will begin the process of backing up the data to the CANDAC servers.
In the morning Kristof checked the NOAA surface ozone analyser at 0PAL, and found that ozone concentrations were rapidly dropping. In anticipation of a surface ozone depletion event (ODE) Kristof made sure the PEARL-GBS was measuring all day to record any observable bromine enhancement, which might be the cause of this ODE. By the evening surface ozone concentrations had dropped to almost zero and Kristof is hoping that the ODE extends high enough above the surface to be observable from the PEARL Ridge Lab. Since the PEARL-GBS had to be measuring all day, Kristof took the UT-GBS offline to perform lab tests.
Due to the weather conditions (cloudy with scattered flurries) Ghazal was unable to make measurements and so the DIAL didn't operate today.
On March 6th, CRL made 24 hours of measurements in the UV and Green channels. Emily did a leak check on laser 1 today, and found that the recent repairs are holding well.
Since no solar measurements were possible today, Erik and Sébastien finished assembling the alignment kit for the Bruker. With Pierre's help the alignment of the Bruker was tested using a HeNe laser in place of the solar beam. The test involved splitting and recombining the HeNE beam at the beamsplitter, redirecting this with a pick-off mirror into a telescope, and observing the interference fringes with a camera. The kit was only used to check the fringe pattern and no alignment steps were taken.
With the sun obscured by clouds all day Paul was unable to make measurements with PARIS-IR. He used the time to finish processing all the data measured during the campaign so far into interferograms and raw spectra. He also worked with Yan to get the PARIS data backup to the CANDAC archives working and all the raw data has since been uploaded to these archives.