On Thursday March 7th, the temperature at the Eureka Weather Station stayed around -40 degrees C, with a light wind of 1.6 knots (7 km/h) bringing the windchill temperature to -49 degrees C. Up the hill at the PEARL Ridge Lab, temperatures were approximately -26 degrees C, with winds of 9.7 knots (18 km/h), giving a windchill index of -34 degrees C. Today was a great day for solar measurements, with clear skies and plenty of sunlight. The team had a total of total of 8 hours and 35 minutes of sunlight today.
In the IR lab, since the sun is rising earlier, Tyler was able to start up the Bruker 125HR and EM27/SUN for measurements around 9am (local time). The skies today were perfectly clear, and the instruments were able to collect a large number of solar spectra from 9am until just before 5pm, when the sun descended below the horizon. While the solar measurements were being collected, Tyler spent some time cleaning up the IR lab, which had become a bit of cluttered during the alignment process of the 125HR and the installation of the EM27/SUN. Weather conditions at PEARL are forecast to be similarly sunny for the next couple of days, so he hopes that the two FTIRs will continue to be able to collect a significant number of measurements.
Since both the PEARL-GBS and the Pandora were operating properly today, Kristof just kept an eye on them while he worked on processing measurements from the past couple of weeks. Since he won't get a chance to finish the UT-GBS lab tests, Kristof set up the instrument so it will be ready for measurements once the CCD controller is fixed.
Xin and Peter started off their day by visiting the sampling sites to the west of the Weather Station, where they collected surface snow samples. Xin had a chance to use his new, purpose-built snow profile sampling tool and successfully got the 2nd inland snow core. Back at 0PAL, Xin continued his work on the snow salinity measurements and prepared for tomorrow's sampling tasks. At the end of the day, Xin managed to collect a small layer of diamond dust from the trays mounted outside 0PAL and at the PEARL Ridge Lab.
In the morning, Ali did his usual routine for SPS where he checks the tracker angle to make sure is accurately tracking the sun, as well as cleaning off the frost, which forms overnight, from the lenses of SPS. He then collected the data from the previous day and analyzed it to ensure the instrument is operating properly. He found that the results are consistent with the previous days, and that the SPS appears to be running nominally. He spent the rest of the day continuing to work on his DIAL temperature retrieval project. He extracted the DIAL data from 2004 including archived radiosonde temperature profiles, and he compared the results of the older, ‘traditional’ method to his newer optimal estimation method (OEM) temperature retrieval algorithm. So far, his OEM retrievals have been better able to reproduce the radiosonde temperature profiles than the ‘traditional’ method.
After dinner, all of the campaign team members gathered in the rec room to play a few games of billiards, and watch a game of hockey on TV.
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