On Monday March 12th the campaign team woke up to another morning of clear skies and sunshine, great weather to take advantage of the 10 hours and 15 minutes of sunlight expected during the day. While clouds eventually did appear in the afternoon, for most of the day the clear sky held. Temperatures at the PEARL Ridge Lab dropped slowly throughout the first part of the day from -30 degrees to -32 degrees, before sharply dropping to -36 degrees in the late afternoon. Over at the weather station the temperature remained fairly steady around -38 degrees for the entirety of the day. With only two days left of the intensive phase of the 2018 campaign the team spent a large part of the day preparing for our approaching departure.
Kristof started tidying up his lab space in preparation for the end of the intensive phase. He also worked on the GBS total column retrieval code to make sure that new NDACC (Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change) data submission deadlines can be met. Both the UT-GBS and the PEARL-GBS are part of the NDACC network.
Sébastien and Erik spent the day taking solar measurements with the Bruker FTIR. Near-infrared measurements were taken in the morning before swapping beam-splitters for mid-infrared measurements in the afternoon. A total of 100 NIR and 41 MIR measurements were taken. Sébastien also analyzed the HCl cell test taken after yesterday's aperture alignment. He found that the modulation efficiency remained unchanged while a slight decrease in phase error was observed. Sébastien and Erik are planning to return to the Ridge Lab this evening with Pierre to perform a series of N2O cell tests to further test the aperture alignment.
Paul checked the SPS and SAOZ periodically throughout the day, finding them working nominally each time. He reset the SPS and tracker computer around 11:45 and left the SPS to continue running overnight. Additionally Paul made sure that the SPS operating instructions were up to date with any changes that have been made to the operating procedure.
In the morning Xin and John made their daily visit to the two sampling sites 5 km to the west of the station, and following this they made their last visit to the sea ice site located in front of the weather station. In the afternoon, Xin continued cleaning up his workspace in the 0PAL lab. After dinner, Pierre, John and Xin had a brief discussion to arrange the continuation of snow sampling from two sites after Xin leaves in two days.
In the evening, following dinner, the team watched another ozonesonde launch, then spent a few more hours working on their various projects. To wind down in the evening, some of the team played a few games on the Nintendo Wii in the rec room, others played billiards, and some just chatted with the weather station staff who we’ve gotten to know well over the past couple weeks.
Cheers,
Paul Jeffery
[On Behalf of the 2018 Canadian ACE/OSIRIS Arctic Validation Campaign Team]