On Sunday February 25th, the skies were mostly clear to begin with, but
by the afternoon they had become partially cloudy. The temperature
throughout the day hovered around -27 degrees Celsius at the PEARL Ridge Lab, and -37 degrees at the Eureka Weather Station, and there was
approximately 4 hours and 50 minutes of sunlight.
Early in the morning Jim Drummond left with the plane that brought in the team the prior day, heading back to Yellowknife.
Kristof spent the afternoon checking the status of the UT-GBS and the
PEARL-GBS. Both instruments have been operating since mid-February. The
UT-GBS is working without any problems, while the PEARL-GBS is currently
limited to zenith-sky measurements due to communication issues with the
suntracker. Kristof is hoping for a calm day tomorrow so he could start
troubleshooting the tracker.
In the IR lab, Erik and Sébastien prepared the 125HR instrument for
measurements. Sébastien cleaned the scanner bars as well as the
compartment seals, and Erik installed the source cooler. Since the sun
stayed behind clouds Sébastien put the Calcium-Fluoride beamsplitter in
the instrument and started a HCl cell test.
Ghazal and Alexey went up to the Ridge Lab and cleaned up the optics of
the laser. The procedure went smoothly and the DIAL is fully
operational; it is ready to operate tonight. Last night, with almost 10
hours of continuous measurements, the DIAL had a successful night.
Paul accompanied Pierre and Xin during the early part of the afternoon
as they surveyed sites for taking snow samples during the campaign, as
well as assisting Xin in unpacking the equipment he’d require to take
snow samples. In the latter part of the afternoon, he checked the status
of SAOZ.
Today Xin had a great start in his snow sampling mission with support
from the CANDAC team, especially Pierre Fogal, who drove him to visit
many potential snow sampling sites near the weather station, the PEARL
Ridge Lab, and the PEARL auxiliary sites. He was quite happy to have the
first few tubes of Eureka snow samples in hand.
Since making repairs to the CRL Emily has had it running for 24 hours a day.
Tom monitored the operation of SPS and found that the instrument
operated successfully overnight and started up automatically to make
observation Sunday morning.
The team had a successful day at PEARL and looks forward to good
measurement conditions tomorrow.
Cheers,
Paul Jeffery
[On Behalf of the 2018 Canadian ACE/OSIRIS Arctic Validation Campaign team]