On Tuesday evening, after the team had finished dinner, we went outside to watch the ozonesonde launch. After watching it drift up and off we all went inside to escape the cold and get to work for the evening. Eventually a few of us decided to unwind by repeating our activities of the day before, playing ping-pong and socializing with some of the Eureka weather station staff.
Wednesday morning opened on clear skies with just over 9 hours of sun up scheduled for the day. The temperature started at -47 degrees, with a wind chill of -61. The team was in high spirits as they travelled to the PEARL Ridge Lab in the morning, as today was the first day since Saturday that was not overcast. Those who make solar measurements were eager to return to doing so. Over the course of the day the clear skies remained, the temperature stayed in the mid -40s, and the wind chill lessened to only about -50 degrees.
Today at the Ridge Lab, Kristof and Pierre reinstalled the PEARL-GBS netcam. Due to high winds and the cramped PEARL-GBS tracker box, which is full of frozen wires, the installation took several hours to complete. Since the surface ozone depletion is still happening today, Kristof did not pause measurements. He hopes to calibrate the netcam on the next sunny day.
Last night, Ghazal ran the DIAL for five hours, between 22:00 and 3:00. At 3:00 the DIAL stopped operating due to windy conditions.
On March 7th CRL made 23 hours and 15 minutes of measurements with both lasers. Emily spent time finishing her depolarization journal article, and got ready to submit it for publication.
Taking advantage of the clear skies Paul spent the day making solar measurements with PARIS-IR, taking a total of 40 through the course of the day. In addition, he prepared updated instructions for operating PARIS during the extended phase of the campaign. In the morning he will begin the upload of today's data to the CANDAC archives, and Paul hopes to continue making solar measurements tomorrow if the weather permits.
This morning when Gurpreet discovered that the sun tracker had become jammed and stopped working. He had to bring the tracker and the SPS inside the lab to figure out the problem. Gurpreet spent the rest of the day troubleshooting the problem, and will continue to work on the tracker tomorrow. He hopes to be able to put it up on the roof again to resume taking the readings tomorrow.
In the IR lab Erik and Sébastien were able to take solar measurements all day. 95 MIR spectra were recorded. They also analysed the last HBr and HCl cell tests.