Windy, cold weather and ice crystals (–33.8°C, –37°C with wind chill) persisted on March13; the team worked from the Weather Station. That night, the team watched the blood moon through a window.
In the morning on March 14, Kevin, Petra, and Darby worked together to clear snow that had buried the CANDAC pickup truck using a spade and two shovels. The weather was blowing snow, –24.2°C (–42°C), with wind speeds of 55 km/hr and wind gusts of 75 km/hr. Even with the high winds, shovelling was tolerable in 15-minute increments, with breaks to thaw and drink water inside a heated building. We cheered when we eventually uncovered enough of the truck to see that it is bright red!
The team went up to the Ridge Lab on March 15 after breakfast and stayed there until just before dinnertime. It was a cloudy day with low visibility. Pierre finished clearing off the staircase that leads to the roof and cleared snow from the two GBS domes. Petra and Darby routed network connections for the FTIR system to enable remote operation.
Petra ran a ‘cell test’, that is a procedure used to characterize the FTIR spectrometer’s alignment and stability relative to previous years. The cell contains a standardized concentration of a trace gas, in this case N2O, and is used to assess the health of the instrument. This analysis is in progress.
Kevin performed calibration tests on the UT-GBS. He used mercury, xenon, and neon gas lamps that emit known emission lines, with fixed relative intensities, to determine the resolution of the pixels on the Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) detector. The measured resolution was consistent with that found during previous years. He then characterized the polarization sensitivity by using a polarizing filter to allow only certain orientations of light to enter the detector. This test is in progress.
When the team returned to the Weather Station in the evening, they had the opportunity to meet other visitors who are gearing up to film a nature documentary in the area.
The Pandora instrument operated nominally.
Cheers,
Darby Bates
[on behalf of the 2025 Canadian Arctic ACE/OSIRIS Validation Campaign team]