On Tuesday March 5th, temperatures at the Eureka Weather Station were around -31 degrees C, with a light wind of 3.2 knots (6 km/h) giving a windchill temperature of -38 degrees C. The temperature at the PEARL Ridge Lab was a little bit warmer at -23 degrees C, with winds of 3.6 knots, bringing the windchill index down to -29 degrees C. Tuesday was a beautiful, sunny day with bluebird skies, and there was a total of 7 hours and 55 minutes of sunlight.
In the morning, Tyler started up the Bruker 125HR for solar measurements, however, due to a bug in the macros used to run the instrument, no spectra were being recorded. Sebastien was able to remotely troubleshoot the issue by noon, and solar measurements were restarted shortly after. Pierre and Tyler also spent some time in the morning aligning the solar beam into the aperture of the EM27/SUN, and they were able to take the first solar spectra of the campaign using this newly installed instrument.
In the UV-Vis lab, Kristof spent the morning making sure that the Pandora alignment code was running properly. He hopes that the almost full day of measurements today will be enough to establish the proper pointing corrections for the instrument. Since the sun is now high enough, Kristof took the season's first MAX-DOAS measurements with the PEARL-GBS. The data are used to study BrO (an important species for tropospheric ozone depletion), although Kristof expects BrO concentrations to be below detection limits today. In the afternoon, he started the lab tests for the UT-GBS, and left the instrument to take dark current measurements overnight.
Xin took the advantage of the good weather conditions today, and for the first time collected snow core samples down to approximately 20 cm below the surface from his sampling site near the PEARL Ridge Lab. These measurements were done in the morning, and then he repeated the sampling later in the afternoon at his inland sampling site. Xin continued on his daily routine of collecting both surface snow samples and falling snow, as well as he working on his snow salinity analysis at 0PAL towards the end of the day.
Ali began his morning by heading up to the roof of the PEARL Ridge Lab and cleaning the frost off of the lenses of the SPS. He then collected the SPS measurements from the previous day, and analyzed them by plotting the various retrieved atmospheric species such as ozone and NO2, and compared these plots to those given to him by Tom. He found that the data collected by the SPS in the past few days is comparable to the sample data from Tom, and he concluded that the instrument is operating properly. He spent most of the afternoon using medium and high range Rayleigh DIAL measurements to retrieve a more complete temperature profile between 15 and 24km, and he confirmed that the DIAL temperature profiles from these channels closely matched data from radiosondes. Near the end of the day, Ali and Tyler took advantage of the calm winds and sunny conditions to go for a walk and they explored the area surrounding the PEARL Ridge Lab.
Cheers,
Tyler Wizenberg
[On Behalf of the 2019 Canadian Arctic ACE/OSIRIS
Validation Campaign team]
* Instrument Status *
Bruker FTIR: Nominal operations
EM/27 SUN FTIR: Nominal operations