On Friday March 8th, the temperature at the Eureka Weather Station stayed at -40 degrees C, with a very calm wind of 0.5 knots (1 km/h) which did not give a noticeable windchill index. At PEARL, temperatures were approximately -29 degrees C, with a light wind of 6.6 knots (12.2 km/h), giving a windchill index of -41 degrees C. Today was another sunny day with clear skies, allowing the team to take plenty of solar measurements. The team had a total of 8 hours and 55 minutes of sunlight today.
Since the sun is rising earlier and the conditions were clear, Tyler was able to start taking solar spectra with the Bruker 125HR and EM27/SUN as soon as he got up to the Ridge Lab in the morning (around 8:50am local time). While the measurements were being taken, he spent some time catching up on his coursework. Over the course of the day, the Bruker 125HR collected 104 spectra across its 7 filters, while the EM27/SUN took over 1700 measurements (it takes faster and shorter scans than the 125HR).
Kristof had to restart the Pandora alignment today, since the alignment calculations indicated a discontinuity in the pointing correction factors. Thanks to the clear skies, the instrument should be able to return to the regular measurement schedule tomorrow. The PEARL-GBS took approximately four hours of MAX-DOAS measurements today; the measurement window will continue to widen as the sun climbs higher in the sky.
As part of their daily routine, Xin and Peter visited all of the sampling sites in the morning and collected snow samples from each sampling point. Xin then worked on the spreadsheet which he uses to keep track of all of the snow samples that he has collected thus far. In the afternoon, he spent time at 0PAL where he continued to work on logging his snow samples and re-bagged some samples for storage. Xin also continued to work on measuring the salinity of a few selected samples.
When Ali first got to the PEARL Ridge Lab, he went up to the roof and cleaned the frost off of the lenses of the SPS, and then performed quality checks on the data from the previous day to ensure that the instrument is continuing to operate properly. Ali sent a portion of the SPS data which has been collected to Tom, who will perform a further analysis on it. For his work on the DIAL, Ali continued to examine the archived data from the 2004 campaign (16 nights in total). So far, his optimal estimation method results are closer to radiosonde data than the older retrieval algorithm. He has found that on some nights during the 2004 campaign, the aerosol layer appears to be stronger, causing the retrieved temperature profiles to deviate from the radiosonde measurements at lower altitudes.
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