On Monday February 26th, the skies were mostly cloudy throughout the
day, only somewhat lessening in the evening. The temperature throughout
the day hovered around -28 degrees Celsius at both the PEARL Ridge Lab
and at the Eureka Weather Station, and there were approximately 5 hours
and 20 minutes of sunlight. While these conditions weren’t great for
some of the team, everyone still managed to make the most of the day.
Since the winds at the Ridge Lab were too strong to work on the roof,
Kristof postponed troubleshooting the PEARL-GBS tracker. During the day
he performed the resolution, polarization, and straylight tests on the
PEARL-GBS. The instrument will make dark current measurements overnight,
and normal measurements will resume tomorrow.
Last night due to the cloudy weather conditions, the DIAL did not
operate. DIAL is fully operational and Ghazal and Alexey have it ready
for tonight's measurements.
Because of high winds, it was not possible to operate the tracker dome
and take solar measurements with the Bruker 125HR. Instead Sébastien did
a second HCl cell test. Once completed, Erik put the KBr beamsplitter in
the Bruker FTS and did a HBr cell test. Sébastien processed the HCl cell
test, and found that the modulation efficiency is comparable to that
obtained before the instrument was winterized. Solar measurements will
start as soon as weather permits.
Xin did further snow sampling at two sites with the help of Paul and
Pierre; one near the stream bed just behind 0PAL, and the other one on
the sea ice about halfway between the weather station and the PEARL
Ridge Lab. Xin found the snow density on sea ice to be much higher than
expected, and it took him about an hour to finish a 1 cm vertical
resolution sampling profile due to the struggle of dealing with this
dense snow pack.
In addition to helping Xin, Paul joined Pierre and Alexey in testing a small drone for remote sensing capabilities.
Overnight on the 25th, it seemed cloudy enough for Emily to try a CRL
sky calibration measurement with the aperture of the telescope covered
by a depolarizer. Despite 11 hours of calibration, the clouds never gave
signals quite high enough to be a satisfactory calibration, so this will
have to be repeated another time. During the day of the 26th, Emily
measured laser power and monitored laser beam shapes, did a half-hour
lamp calibration, and then began regular lidar measurements again, which
have so far been going on for 7 hours.
Finally SPS continued normal operations and analysis of preliminary data
by Tom was found to look promising.
In the evening the team worked on individual projects and hoped that the
weather would be more cooperative in the morning.
Cheers,
Paul Jeffery
[On Behalf of the 2018 Canadian ACE/OSIRIS Arctic Validation Campaign Team]