On Monday March 11th, the temperature at the Eureka Weather Station was -28 degrees C, with winds of 7 knots (13 km/h) giving a windchill index of -39 degrees C. At PEARL, temperatures were approximately -27 degrees C, with winds of 24.8 knots (46 km/h), bringing the windchill temperature down to -43 degrees C. The weather today was characterized by cloudy skies and a very light snowfall throughout the day. Today the team had a total of 9 hours and 50 minutes of sunlight.
Since the cloudy conditions persisted today and solar measurements were not possible, Tyler spent his day continuing the series of cell tests for the Bruker 125HR. He collected another background spectrum for the mid-infrared (MIR) configuration, and then ran an HCl cell test to check the performance of the near-infrared (NIR) wavelength range. After the results were analyzed, it was found that the modulation efficiency and signal levels of the NIR configuration were greatly improved after the source compartment mirror adjustment. However, the MIR configuration displays some unusual noise in the signal, and as a result Tyler will perform a second set of N2O cell tests tomorrow.
In preparation for remote operation, Kristof prepared the PEARL-GBS and UT-GBS data for automatic transfer to the servers down south, and double-checked the remote connection to the instruments. Since the Pandora and the PEARL-GBS are working well, Kristof spent the rest of the day reviewing the literature on bromine chemistry.
This morning, for the first time Peter collected snow samples from all of the sampling sites under Xin’s supervision, as well as collecting a snow core on the sea ice. Peter and Pierre will continue the snow sampling project until 27th March to extend the dataset. In the afternoon, Xin and Peter went back to the sea ice to collect an additional snow core at the same sampling point that they visited on 6th March, with the goal of checking the snow salinity profile of the previously collected snow core. At 0PAL, Xin continued snow salinity measurements and re-bagged some samples ready for long-term storage.
Since the winds were quite high today, Pierre went up to the roof instead of Ali to clean the lenses of the SPS. As part of Ali’s daily procedure, he checked the spectra collected during the previous day, but found that due to the cloudy conditions, yesterday’s spectra had low signal levels. In order to make sure SPS is functioning properly Ali sent some data to Tom for analysis. They concluded that the SPS continues to operate properly, and the only issue they have found so far is with the NO2 retrieval, which is still in development.
Cheers,
Tyler Wizenberg
[On Behalf of the 2019 Canadian Arctic ACE/OSIRIS
Validation Campaign team]
* Instrument Status *
Bruker FTIR: Offline (for cell measurements)
EM/27 SUN FTIR: Nominal operations