On Wednesday March 7th the campaign team awoke to a temperature of -40 degrees at the Eureka weather station, a fair drop from what we had experienced over the early days of the campaign. At the weather station the temperature remained around -40 degrees for the rest of the day, while at the PEARL Ridge Lab the temperature hovered around a somewhat more moderate -31 degrees. While there were falling ice crystals throughout portions of the day, the sky remained generally clear, allowing the team to make use of the 8 hours and 40 minutes of sunlight that was seen.
The clear sky allowed the Bruker FTIR to make solar measurements during most of the day, and 63 MIR spectra were recorded. During the afternoon some measurement were lost as the scanner stopped moving, and the Bruker had to be reset before the scanner could receive new commands.
When Paul got to the lab he found that the SPS tracker had once again lost contact with the tracker control computer during the night. Paul set about trying possible methods of securing the tracker’s exterior communication connection, ultimately adding to the existing connection a set of COM port studs and screws, to better guard against the connection wiggling loose, and a plastic bag, to further isolate the connectors from the elements. After doing this, the tracker and SPS software were restarted and measurements recommenced, with periodic checkups by Paul. Later at Tom’s suggestion Paul verified the software’s directory configuration. Paul also sent Tom data recorded over the previous few days and preliminary analysis of that was found to be promising. Paul left SPS and the tracker running overnight. A check of SAOZ indicated that it continues to perform nominally.
Last night another period of snow prevented measurements from being made with the DIAL. Ghazal remains optimistic, hoping tonight would provide the clear nighttime conditions she requires for measurements.
Kristof spent the day analyzing spectra from both the UT-GBS and the PEARL-GBS. After doing the wavelength calibration, he retrieved slant columns from the zenith-sky measurements to date, and the results indicate that the data are of good quality.
This morning Xin and John made their second visit to the SAFIRE sampling site near the end of the Eureka airport runway. Afterwards they returned to the sampling sites 5 km away from the weather station to gather snow samples for vertical profiling. In the afternoon, Xin took some further snow samples and collected 20 tubes of surface snow from atop the sea ice near the weather station.
In the evening, as has been done the previous few days, part of the campaign team watched the ozonesonde launch at 23:15 UTC (6:15 local time), though they chose to do so from the warmth of the weather station rec room. Afterwards the team members divided their time amongst either various campaign or project related tasks, exercising, or playing a few games on the Nintendo Wii that’s in the weather station rec room.
Cheers,
Paul Jeffery
[On Behalf of the 2018 Canadian ACE/OSIRIS Arctic Validation Campaign Team]