On Thursday March 8th, the temperature at the Eureka weather station remained close to -41 degrees all day, while up at the Ridge Lab it steadily warmed throughout the day from -34 degrees to -28 degrees. While some ice crystals fell throughout the day at the weather station, at PEARL the sun shone brightly with little obstruction, allowing the team to take advantage of the 9 hours of sunlight to make solar measurements. In the afternoon, since the weather was pleasant and their instruments were performing well, Erik, Paul and Kristof took a walk along the ridge behind PEARL. While the walk was exhausting due to the hilly path they took, coupled with their bulky Arctic gear, they found it worth it for the truly spectacular Arctic landscape.
Kristof looked at the PEARL-GBS MAX-DOAS data today. The retrieved slant column densities indicate that high concentrations of BrO were present around Eureka during the past couple of days. This is the first 'bromine explosion' of this campaign, and the combination of BrO measurements, surface ozone data, and snow samples should provide very interesting results.
In the morning Paul checked on the status of SPS and the tracker and found that both had operated well overnight, the improvements Paul made to the tracker connection seeming to have worked as intended. A little before noon Paul reset the tracker and SPS software, to prevent possible memory issues with the computer, before letting the two run again. Periodic checks were made of SPS and SAOZ throughout the day and both were found to be operating nominally. SPS was left to run overnight.
Last night the DIAL was prevented from making measurements due to issues experienced with its camera. Today Ghazal spent the morning at PEARL troubleshooting the issue, eventually getting it working again. She hopes that tonight will have suitable conditions to make measurements with the DIAL.
In the IR lab Erik and Sébastien took 167 NIR measurements. At the end of the day Sébastien started a HCl cell test.
With help from John, Xin collected snow samples from atop the sea ice just in front of the station. Afterwards they moved to the site 5 km to the west of the station and collected samples as usual from the sea ice site there. At the inland site Xin took samples from 5 points for validation purposes. In the afternoon he repacked the samples in 0PAL to better ensure their safe transit. Xin was particularly excited about being visited by a wolf during his time out collecting samples, and while he kept a safe distance he found it to be a beautiful animal.
After returning to the weather station in the evening the team split up, each going off to make use of the remainder of the day, whether by working on research projects, exercising in the small gym, doing laundry, or catching up on some reading. With only a week to go until they depart Eureka, each is trying to make the most of their remaining time here.
Cheers,
Paul Jeffery
[On Behalf of the 2018 Canadian ACE/OSIRIS Arctic Validation Campaign Team]