Uh, turns out that we only arrived here yesterday. Even though yesterday was a long time ago.

After some discussion with Zahra, we've deduced that we only arrived in Eureka yesterday. This took some calculation and puzzling. I logged into my blog account today with a guilty sense of “I didn't even write to say we've arrived! I guess if I just do a few days' of posts, I'll catch up soon”. Well. I don't feel so bad now that I realize we've barely been here for 30 hours.

I'll catch you up anyways. Because we did some stuff.

Breakfast was good this morning! I'm pretty sure Roxanne thinks my breakfast standards are low because I was quite happy to find my way to a delicious bowl of porridge. She probably doesn't know just how much I LIKE good porridge. There were eggs and pancakes and other things too, but porridge is delicious. Plus, you can decorate it with colourful fruit.

Sham is studying water vapour, so we were anxious to get the ultraviolet laser put back together today. Chris was going to help us align things in the sky, so we were at the mercy of his schedule in Halifax. Clear skies are also needed. We had both lined up for today, conveniently. We started in first thing. Sham got the pump chamber in with not too much trouble, but the hoses for the cooling system needed some gaskets replaced. That accomplished, we got the UV laser prepped for alignment and measurements.

I was sort of dreading that moment. Putting hardware back together makes me happy. Aligning cranky laser beams can sometimes make me want to cry. Today, however, alignment went very smoothly. Sham had some good ideas for how we could tell how far out of alignment we were starting, and combining that with the usual procedure helped confirm that we were on the right track. I don't think I've ever experienced such a straightforward alignment in my life. Both the UV and Green laser beams were able to be aligned on the optics table in really sensible ways. Chris started the software for alignment in the sky (to get the telescope and the laser beam to look in the same place for each other), and found that BOTH laser beams were within the field of view of the scope already. He didn't have to tweak the alignment much before starting the auto-align program. Even that procedure went well.

The only problem we had all day was one laser turning itself off because I left two cables plugged in that were not necessary (they're for when you only want to fire one shot at a time by pressing a button. I didn't know that the lasers don't like having them plugged in when they're not required), and the laser did not realize that when I put “P-zero-zero” in as a parameter, I really meant “P-zero-one”. It flashed once, and then stopped. Just like I told it to. I gave it some new instructions, and it did those, too. The right ones, this time.

In case you (especially Meike) are interested: I also spent time today staring down a tube at a smallish mirror under a dark inaccessible window at -50 C on a roof in order to watch said mirror rotate by one degree. Maybe less. Slowly. It was thrilling, let me tell you. [Yes, it was useful also. And didn't actually take that long. And I got to go outside during daylight hours.]

 

Smallish mirror down a dark tunnel. When it moves, it doesn't move much.

We came back to the station once both lasers were firing, and all detection channels were detecting. It's been on the go ever since! Calibrations on the depolarization channel start in earnest tomorrow with us drilling holes through boards.

The laser! What can I say? We tried it, and it worked!

Sham and I headed over to the 0PAL lab just after supper to get (re)acquainted with the lab, and to see whether we could get anything done in preparation for the next full day's work. This time, luckily, there was a) distilled water whose containers had not frozen themselves to the floor, b) a good sky for lidaring, c) no snow on our hatch (Thanks, Pierre and Mike!). The lab was in great shape, so after checking things out, we jumped right in.

We got the green laser firing out of the hatch, launched the data acquisition program, and (miracle of miracles) went to sleep while the lidar took care of running itself. We managed to get the emails sent by the lidar's alarm program (in case we need to shut down for snow or wind) to make audible alarms when they arrived in our inboxes. Sounds low-tech and like it should not be hard (especially if you're used to email on a phone... which I am not!), but is surprisingly hard to do on some Certain Brands of Laptop. Even when they have built-in features for the purpose. In any event, without the audible feature, the lidar operator has to wake up every so often and check on things. With the audio... well, it's easier. A Fancy Tablet worked great for me, and Sham's phone seems to be working for her.

In the morning, we woke up to a 9-hour data set in our visible channels.

This counts as a successful bonus lab day!

We made it to Eureka - and got a lot done

First things first: The lidar is measuring! Yay! We're doing the things we came here to do.

Four days after leaving home in London, we arrived in Eureka. With the delays in Yellowknife, I think most of us were actually more rested upon arrival than we would have been if we'd had two straight flying days in a row. 

We woke up at 5:30 am, breakfasted at the hotel at 6 am, and were at the Air Tindi terminal by 6:30 with all of our luggage. We flew in a Beech 1900D, and our pilots are familiar from past trips to Eureka. I don't know what kind of superpower turbo props they installed in that plane, because it's about the fastest three-legged trip to the lab that I've ever seen. We weren't on the ground long in Cambridge Bay before climbing back aboard en route to Resolute.

 This is Zahra. She's a PhD student at York University, and she was pretty excited about her first trip to Eureka (It's not her first trip to the Arctic; she studied in Sweden for 2 years). She's also my roomie this trip!

Resolute's weather behaved okay. The weather was fine all the way in, then we had some winds off the mountain which surprised us all a few hundred meters above the ground, and then Mitch set us down gently on the ground as though the turbulence had never happened. It went from “Hey, Resolute's got no wind, for once!” to “Ack! Bumpy! Don't like it!” to “Huh. Where'd the wind go?” and then we landed. No problem.

Aziz met our plane, we got fueled up, and were on our way again. Although we're early in the year, we had left early enough in the day to have daylight for most of the trip. In fact, we could see pretty well all the way in to Eureka. 

The Arctic just gets more and more beautiful as you travel North, and Ellesmere is the prettiest part! Lots of nice topography to keep things interesting, and with it all being various shades of snowy white, nothing is white at all. It's so pretty. The sun far to the south lights up the sky all sorts of colours, and the contrast of the sunlit peaks with the shadowed sides of the hills is just great. We were able to get good views of the PEARL lab and the road and the weather station on our final approach.

 We stayed up at the runway just long enough to say hello to some friends who were on their way back south, and then headed down for supper.

That would have made quite a nice end to the day, right? Except that with single-digit-numbers of days planned to be at the lab this trip, every one of them counts. A lot. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Sham and I were over at the lab at the first opportunity to see what we could sensibly get done.

Our little science group escaped from "hotel-arrest" today, after hearing in the afternoon that our plane would definitely not be leaving any time soon. We're aiming for tomorrow morning instead, pending weather.

We took advantage of the beautiful weather here to take another walk to some of the art galleries.

The Canada Goose jackets flying in a V. How appropriate!

We hit the usual Gallery of the Midnight Sun, and Northern Images, before heading for one that is new to us. This one had carvings done by the store owner and other local artists. These were done in alabaster, mammoth tusk, and the like.


Paul was our leader on the hunt for art.

Why not stop by the still-under-construction Snow King Castle while we're at it? The anonymous fellow in the wall shows just how thick the walls are. There's about 1 foot of snow, and then bricks of ice inside that. The workers are in the process of carving away the outer layer of snow to leave icy windows behind. The castle opens for visitors as of March 1st, so maybe we'll be able to stop in on our way back through YK.

Gravity waves, anyone?

Lovely view off the balcony this morning:

Prefer to read Sinhala?

See Sham's blog, too!

 http://shamgamage.blogspot.ca/ 

Check it out if you read any Sinhala/Sinhalese, and check it out just for the photos if you can't!

Sham climbed the hill to the Pilot's Monument yesterday, and got some different views of Yellowknife.

You'll notice that we are still in Yellowknife

Hi! We're still in Yellowknife, although we were ready to head to the airport for 6:30 this morning. We got the call while eating breakfast that our flight would be delayed. Why, you ask? Bad weather.

Weather in Yellowknife: Gorgeous. Just fine for flying. Beautiful.
Weather in Eureka: -50 C. Just fine for flying. Beautiful.

 (Yes, there's no weather forecast for the weather station. Go figure.)

The problem is with the airports on the way. We're taking a Beech 1900D this time, and have a lot of gear with us. We'll have to stop twice on the way, once in Cambridge Bay, and once in Resolute. This time, the delay is because of weather in Resolute Bay.

It's windy, with snow blowing. With no acceptable alternate runway nearby, our entire flight is on hold until the weather clears up.

Maybe by late tonight.
Maybe not.

I guess we'll wait and see!

Onward to Yellowknife

The flights to Yellowknife were not especially exciting, thank goodness. We met 7/8ths of the rest of the ACE team at our gate in Toronto, and traveled together. Paul met us in Yellowknife.

Dan with his new acquisition:

 

Dan and I are both learning how to use our new cameras.  We're anticipating many terrible shots as we learn all the non-optimal settings, and a few good ones here and there as we stumble upon something that works. We were practicing at the airport. 

It was chilly when we got to Yellowknife, but we decided to go for a walk anyways. Three of this year's team are on their first trip here, so we did the obligatory walk down to Old Town. It was really sunny, with clear blue skies.

I saw a couple of ravens (my favourite birds!) as soon as we got here, and Sham was interested to hear that they don't only caw like crows do, but they make other sounds as well. There might also have been some delight expressed about the funny sounds your boots make on the snow when the snow is really cold.

A little walk out onto Great Slave Lake brought us to the vicinity of the houseboats, the ice road, and the beginnings of the Snow King's castle.

Supper at the Black Knight, and then it was time for bed in preparation for our flight out the next morning, scheduled for 6:30 am. (Why so early, when we book a charter flight and can pick the time? It takes all day to get to Eureka, in 3 hops, and the more of that you can do in daylight, the better.)

Say “Hi!” to Sham!

Sham is a grad student in the same lab as me at Western. She's just starting to do Arctic research using the CRL, so we're both going on this trip. Her first experience with snow was this fall in London (she's from Sri Lanka), and she is wasting no time getting to even colder places. It will be nice to have some company at the lab, and this should give her an opportunity to get some experience with all the equipment and taking atmospheric measurements.

For those of you who recognize the concrete-laden shady location for the photo: For every time we make fun of people wearing Arctic-strength winter coats in Southern Ontario... Well, let's just say that Sham and I both broke out the parkas while waiting for a shuttle at Pearson Airport in Toronto. It was cold and windy, and we had to wait ages for the shuttle to show up after the first leg of our journey.

What you missed while I was learning new facts about sheet polarizers last fall. Also: Hey, we're going back to Eureka!

It's that time of year again! The sun comes up on the Arctic, the polar stratospheric ozone does interesting things, and the ACE Validation Campaign Team treks back to Eureka to do an intensive measurement campaign. Thus, it's clearly time to write some blog posts!

If you only know me in blogspace (which is highly unlikely, but certainly possible), then you're one Eureka Trip behind the times at the moment. I was there in October/November for a couple of weeks doing some more calibrations. I learned a lot of things that I didn't know I'd ever wonder about.

I didn't THINK that I had blogged zero times on my fall trip to Eureka, but couldn't find any posts here today. Turns out that I was right... but that I had blogged somewhere else. Please consider the following transcription of the email I sent to my parents last fall as your Official Catch Up, and click on the link in it:

Hi Mum and Dad,

I wrote a blog post for our research group. It's here: http://createarcticscience.wordpress.com/2013/11/02/eureka-polar-night-campaign-2013/

Critter count:

0 wolves

8 bunnies

2 muskoxen (one of which was running, so he gets bonus points)

Love,
Emily

That CREATE Arctic Science blog has things written by my fellow grad students, some of whom do research at Eureka. My post is just one contribution.  Check out http://createarcticscience.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/preparations-for-the-2014-ace-campaign-at-pearl/ in particular, if you want to see what's going on during the campaign in other ways.

If you're link-shy, here's a screenshot:

Part two of this post:

In case you are a scientist yourself, for school, or work, or because you like to tinker, here's a public service announcement of several facts:

1. Waxed paper CAN be a great depolarizing material. Not all of it is. Try various brands. Archival-Quality waxed paper ("Glassine") works better than any kitchen brand I've tried. You'll be familiar with this stuff if you are a museum archivist, but also if you've ever read one of those books that has a colour plate in it with that waxed-paper-like protective sheet over the picture. That waxed paper is the stuff I'm talking about. Buy a new pack from an art supply store, though. Don't hurt the books to get it!

2. Linear sheet polarizers. Three different brands threw us for a loop last November. Linear polarizers act like a fence, allowing through only light that oscillates in one plane, and blocking anything wiggling along a different plane. That's what I expected my sheet linear polarizers to do. They're way more affordable than crystalline polarizers (i.e. they do not cost 700$/one-inch-circle), and they're easy to transport because you can just roll them up. Turns out, (pun not quite intended, but I just noticed it :) that although these sheet polarizers allow only one plane of polarization to pass through (good!), sheet polarizers can ALSO send that light out the other side of the polarizer in not-the-same-plane-it-came-in-as (not so helpful!). If you have an application in which you put your detector directly behind the polarizer, you'll never know (or care) the difference. If you've got more polarizing optics downstream.... well, it makes a difference. Be warned. Not impossible to compensate for, but mighty confusing at 3am when you were not expecting your polarizer to do that.

More about our 2014 spring trip tomorrow as the team heads to Yellowknife!

Who can resist one more wolf photo? Not me!

In which people and wolves come and go

The Intermittent Blogger is back. Summary of lately: Accountants have arrived, counted things, hiked, and left again. An electrician, a plumber and a carpenter did that, too, minus the hiking. Now a drilling team is here. It was really cloudy for days and days.

  And then it was beautiful and clear, except: On some days there was one cloud in front of the sun, and on other days there was one cloud surrounding PEARL's mountain top. To do direct-sun measurements with the campaign spectrometers, that doesn't work so great. On those days, we worked on other things.

 Now it's been sunny again for a few days, so we've been making lots of measurements.

 Measurements of wolves? Don't mind if we do! The pack showed back up at the station this morning. There were 15 that we counted, and more nearby for sure as we could hear them howling at one another. Some were huge, and some were kind of scrawny.

 One carried a stick around.

 This is Pierre and me. Obligatory 80 degrees North photo which has to be taken every time a new group of folks comes up to the lab with us. This photo captured the iceberg to the left of Pierre's head. More closeup photos o' that to come!

Lidar is doing well. Superhero Labmate Chris has been gathering data pretty much nonstop unless the winds are blowing too hard (which they sometimes do. 20 knots is the limit for the hatch cover). I get to go tinker with some flashlamps tomorrow, though.

I lost my watch and found a rock

A few days ago, I realized that I couldn't find my watch. I didn't look very hard for it, figuring it would turn up in a pocket somewhere. Yes, I checked the pockets of my jeans. That was easy. Checking the pockets of my parka? That's an adventure unto itself. I mustered up the courage to start the hunt yesterday evening. First off, there are about 50 pockets. Some pockets are layered on or in other pockets. Some are completely hidden. I've lost things for weeks in there before.

Results:

• 3 pens
• kleenex
• Snickers bar
• 7 batteries
• 2 USB sticks
• 3 screws
• dental floss
• a pencil sharpener
• a big rock
• hair elastics
• two mittens (in different pockets)
• my watch

Success! And now, apparently, I don't need to keep carrying around the giant rock everywhere I go.

While we're on the subject of pockets: I enjoy that when I'm wearing my Parka, I effectively have a pocket calculator with 8Gb of RAM. It shares a pocket with my lab book.

Making friends with Ridge Lab instruments

I went up to the Ridge lab with the crew yesterday was to learn about how to run each of the instruments that Pierre and I will be operating during the Extended Phase of the ACE campaign. I operated them all with Paul last year, but a refresher is always useful. All the photos in here today were taken by Dan Weaver, who operates the Bruker with Joseph.

Bruker training with Joseph:

I love lidars a lot (Lasers! Telescopes! I get to build stuff. What's not to like?). I also really enjoy getting to see what the others are up to in Eureka. I'm curious. I also figure that the more experience working with other sorts of equipment I can manage to cram in my head, the better (The experience goes into my head; the equipment itself does not). It's neat. And it gives me a glimpse into other ways of doing similar things. Who know what will be useful 5 years from now? The opportunity to stay in Eureka for the extended campaign is also ideal, because it lets our CRL lidar keep operating for an additional couple of weeks.

 The suntracker for the Bruker and PARIS instruments has a personality of its own.

Some of the instruments have been moved and modified since the last campaign, so we went through the operating procedures to make sure that what the grad students want to have done with their instruments is the same as what they have written that they want to have done with them. Xiaoyi's instrument is now much easier to access. No more climbing on ladders necessary!

Debora is operating PARIS, which is the same as the Fourier Transform Spectrometer in the ACE experiment on SCISAT. She's reminding me of the multiple different ways that the PARIS data gets backed up.

At the start of the campaign, it's important to have a solid team in Eureka getting everything set up, troubleshooting any problems, etc. Now that things are running smoothly, our skeleton crew should be able to keep up with the routine for the next few weeks!

I love Eureka. Good hike to the North of PEARL.

I love Eureka. We had a really great day yesterday.

In the morning, I went up to the Ridge Lab with the rest of the ACE campaign crew. They're all going to fly out on the 19th (this coming Tuesday), so it was a good day for a refresher about how to run all the instruments. Lots of the instruments up there work such that you have to press buttons for 3 minutes, and then wait 2 hours while measurements happen. Then you press buttons for 3 minutes again. Given that there were 6 of us at the lab and things were running well, some of us took the opportunity to go for a hike.

 

 All of these photos are in no particular order.

 We walked North from the Ridge Lab. We walked far enough that we could see Eureka Sound (the station is on Slidre Fjord, which is off of Eureka Sound), and we could see Axel Heiberg Island, too.

 See? Gorgeous. It was such a nice sunny day, mid -20s, no wind, and plenty of time to not have to rush back. I saw parts of Ellesmere I'd never seen before. Every time before that I've walked in that direction, I've always dropped down into one of the valleys at one point. This time, instead, we kept high up on the ridges, and were rewarded with beautiful vistas.

 The sun 3:00 PM sun looks low in the sky, we had no worries about getting back before dark - it takes hours and hours for the sun to set. We tried looking for Comet PanStars around 9:30 pm and the sky STILL wasn't dark enough to see it (although I explored the moon and Jupiter through binoculars, sitting next to a bunny trail, and that made it worth getting my snowsuit back on).

 The ridge lab is in the photo above. It's in the middle of the frame. It's just far away. We ended up walking about twice as far from the ridge lab as this.

 Dan, Debora and Paul - veritable Arctic Explorers!

 This is Debora. Turns out that whatever altitude you lose by climbing down, you will inevitably have to work twice as hard to regain on the way home. When you're doubly tired. And kind of hungry.

Ah, taking a break. The legs are tired, but my brain is happy. Just wish I had a wider-angle camera lens to show you all how awesome it is.

Testing depolarizers with The Scientific Method

A couple of days ago, I spent a while using the linearly-polarized laptop screen as a light source to test how well an optic can depolarize light. The first optic closest to the screen is a polarizer, and it's rotated to let through the maximum LCD light, while rejecting anything that isn't quite polarized in the right direction. The second one on a stand is the depolarizer. The one in my hand is an extra polarizer. I was rotating it to see whether the light was still polarized after going through the depolarizer or not. It wasn't. That was good news. That means the depolarizer is useful in the lidar during test lamp measurements (which we did day-before-yesterday).

This was also the first time in a long time that I've consciously used The Scientific Method As Taught In Grade Seven. I had a hypothesis, set up a controlled experiment, observed, etc. My science usually isn't exactly a lab science, where you can give various quantities of something to rats, and leave the other rats alone as control cases. I can't order the atmosphere to give me lovely test cases of precisely known amounts of ice and water in the sky, exactly when I want them. I more or less have to work with what the sky comes up with. Testing the depolarizing optic, though? Man, was that cooperative. For once, I didn't even have to worry about how windy it was outside, in order to get something done.

Walks with a Fox

We went for a walk. As you can tell, it's evening. I was in the lab all morning, and I was in the lab all afternoon, so this was the first chance I got to take a real break today.

This was at 7 PM, and it's still twilight. The sun set around 3:30 this afternoon. As we walked, the stars started coming out. How neat to see Polaris nearly at the zenith. It's only 10 degrees off, up here. Castor and Pollux were shining brightly, too. (And, totally off-topic, if you read the 1952 sci fi book The Rolling Stones by Robert Heinlein, Castor and Pollux star there, too. They have spaceships, but still record things on "spools". And use slide rules.)

 First, we saw a bunny! He had a bunny friend with him, and they were eating supper.

 Dan and Paul, climbing an icy hill in a gully.

Later on, on the top of the ridge (behind where Dan and Paul are in the other picture) we saw someone who would have turned the bunnies into supper:

 It was dark, and after you drop your camera on the frozen ground last year (twice), your flash no longer works. So squint your eyes a bit and believe me that there really is an arctic fox in the picture above. He started out on the opposite side of a little gully from us. As we walked around and climbed up another hill, he followed us, and checked us out. He got within probably 3 m of us at one point. We headed back for the station because it was starting to get even darker, and the fox followed us on our path for a little while. So fluffy! And he's quick, too. He had no problem covering way more ground than we did, in no time.

One solitary cloud

Dear Cloud, are you made of ice, or are you made of water? You're at 6 km, and you're 2 km tall. You hung around the lidar for 3 hours. You had no buddies - you were the only cloud in the sky.  You'd be a great "reality check" for the depolarization measurements.... but we can't be sure of our calibrations until we see another one.

The first part of our Campaign crew left this morning on the plane. Now I'm the only one at the 0PAL lab, as Zen finished his E-AERI work in time to catch this ride home.

Met Tech Johnny and I went for a post-lunch walk to the northwest of the station. The sun is getting pretty high in the sky these days, splashing sunbeams right onto the 0PAL lab and the station.

We went for a walk today, up behind the station, past the 0PAL lab. 

We saw this new track truck, but we didn't drive anywhere in it. The station staff use it to get to the spot on the frozen fjord where they do the ice survey. 

Not having any particular destination in mind, we ambled over the hills and took a look back toward the station. We were walking just after lunch, and the sun rose around 9:30 or something in the morning. Look how high it isn't in the sky! It just skims across to the right, until about 3:30, when it dips back down behind Cape Hare.

Animal tracks: Bunny, Fox, Wolf, Human (well, once we were there anyways), and lemming!  We followed the wolf tracks for a bit, but then I got caught up in the lemming trail and had to see where it went. Lemmings are little, like mice and voles.

 Following..... and the lemming tracks start looping back on themselves. Is our lemming being chased down by some predatory creature? And OH NO! Look at that ripped up mess of snow where the tracks disappear!!

On further inspection, it appears that the lemming was merely going home. He lives in this hole (or in some burrow attached to the hole, anyways!)