It's been a busy few days

in Eureka.

We arrived a few days ago, and have been working and playing (hockey on sea ice!!) ever since.


This is a wolf we saw today right by the weather station. We followed him for a while, but tried not to get too close because he was alone - and therefore probably HUNGRY!



This campaign I'm doing some hardware work for the CANDAC RMR Lidar which is run by a group at Dalhousie University. The lab is at 0pal (Zero-altitude PEARL Auxiliary Laboratory, where PEARL is the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory). PEARL is the big red lab on the ridge that I was at last year, but 0pal is down near the weather station - very convenient 14-second commute to work every day. The lidar lab is pretty small, on purpose. It all fits within a shipping container that has a hatch in the roof for the light to come in and out. The black foam core things in the front (looks like the top of the table but it's not) cover the lasers, and the big black box that I'm making holes in is called the polychromator. The things sticking out the top are photomultiplier tubes, one for each wavelength of light that is received and counted by the lidar. Part of what I'm doing in Eureka is to move and install a depolarization channel in the lidar so that we can differentiate between water and ice in the clouds. The results of that should be very interesting later, but for now it just means that I have to drill holes through metal plates so that I can hook everything into the box. The primary telescope mirror is at the bottom of the biggest black box (at my elbow), which extends down almost to the floor.

PEARL and 0pal... Yes, Mum, there is one more: SAFIRE. It's a radar, and Zen and I went out there today with Keith when he did his checks on the building. It takes up a whole field, and each antenna is much taller than I am.

Yellowknife

This year, the U of T crew for polar sunrise includes Rodica (on the left, looking interested in the snow), Cristen (centre, gazing at the sunset) and Zen (yes, he's writing "Zen") and Felicia (who didn't come on the walk). We got to Yellowknife around lunch time, which is much earlier than usual. For once, we had a chance to walk around while it was still light enough out to see. We walked downtown and then found a trail around a lake and followed that. We went past a building which has all the flags of the NWT peoples out front, and then went out onto the lake. There were snowmobiles zooming by, and I think I spied a game of soccer down one end of the lake. Around the corner there were a bunch of kids playing hockey. It was nice to get outside after too many days on airplanes this week! (four full ones. 2am until time for bed kind of days). Plus, I just really like Yellowknife. Next morning, we were off bright and early for Eureka.

Tugboats to the Arctic

These are some of my favourite things about Halifax:

Another Polar Sunrise campaign on the way and another trip to the Arctic. On the way, a stopover in Halifax. This trip I'll be working with the Dalhousie University group on the CANDAC- RMR lidar at 0pal, so I went out to Hali for 2 days to learn about their system and to pick up some bits and pieces to bring. Figures that the only pictures I took were of tugboats.

Balloon Launch... finally!

I have been waiting for this moment since last February:


This is Andre and he let me launch a weather balloon!!!!

It kind of made my week. It was awesome. Thanks Andre!

This is Bubba

And he is a muskox.Bubba is a lone muskox. He looks pretty old, and for the last 2 or 3 days we have seen him alone lying in the sun by the beach on the way to the lab. He has been getting lots of sun, lots of rest, and hasn't been eating too much. We didn't realize it until zooming in on photos we'd taken, but he's also only got one horn left. Maybe he took on a muskox he shouldn't have?

In order to get the laser aligned, we ended up staying at the lab working until 1:30 am one night. That was cool because although the sun does not set, it does move around the sky, so at 1:30 it was in a part of the sky where we never usually see it because we're asleep. This day on the drive home we saw some really nice reflections of the hills off Slidre Fjord.



We went for a walk last night, all four of us, and saw some cool plants on the way.

Today we went down to the ocean so that Bruce could put his hand in. Two of us were brave and got in above the ankles. The faces show just how pleasant this experience wasn't, especially compared to the swim in idyllic conditions this past week! It was ICY!


The laser is aligned and we're all set up to start measurements as soon as it gets dark in the fall. We're heading back to Yellowknife tomorrow morning, then back south the day after that. This continues to be an awesome trip.

Polar Bear Dip

Polar bear dip! This was the greatest day I've had since I arrived in Eureka. Worked for the morning in the lab, then drove partway down the ridge and went for a 4 hour walk on the hills and valleys overlooking Eureka Sound. It's all rocky up there, and it was such a nice day. It turned out to be about 14 degrees according to the weather station staff, but it felt much warmer. We took a break halfway through just to lie on the hill, soak up a bit of sunshine and some of the heat radiating out of the rock. The air was so still, and when there was a breeze it was a warm, gentle wind. As we walked back toward the truck (so as not to be late for supper down at the station) it just got hotter and hotter in the sun.

We drove the rest of the way down the ridge, and Bernard says, "I just want to dabble my feet in the water" and Mike and I though this was of course a great idea. It was the perfect day for it, and just in case we didn't get another chance, we wanted to wade in the Arctic Ocean. Well we did more than wade. Twice. We didn't set the camera to take a picture the first time, so we decided to do it again right after! Such a fantastic time.


Detector box for the laser: This is the part that collects the scattered light from the atmosphere and counts the photons in photomultiplier tubes. I spent many hours staring at this part of the lidar yesterday.And to top off the perfect day, we played a round of disc golf with some folks from Quebec who are up here studying greater snow geese. Turns out that during the summer they hatch goslings and none of the birds (adults included) can fly as they lose their flight feathers. So the people we met just have to catch the birds and band them. These bunnies in the picture below stayed with us for the first hole of golf. They were too intent on gnawing on the plywood to be bothered by frisbees whizzing past their ears. Better than gnawing rocks I guess?


Awesome day.

Today's update on the laser: we turned it on! The chiller is filled and operating. The technician from the laser company has arrived and today worked all day to check our connections, check for gas leaks, check the electronics of the laser, etc. We just ran it with helium inside (so that the electrodes could fire but it couldn't lase) and then after that we filled it with the usual HCl, Xe, He mix to leave it for an overnight pressure check. Tomorrow we will let it lase and shine it through the hole in the roof and try to get it aligned a bit. We also cleared out the old lidar lab next door (basically abandonned) and consolidated about 40 boxes into a more reasonable number. Excited to see how it goes with the laser lasing tomorrow.

Rose Rocks!

I don't have a single picture of a rose rock. Neither do the other two people who were rose rock hunting with me. Plenty of pictures of the hunt, we found plenty of rocks, but not a single picture of them to put here. Just realized that. Still, the hunt for rose rocks and the 4 minute beach trip were the highlights of my day.

There's a creek beside the weather station, and it's pretty dry this time of year so we went across it to look for rose rocks after work. These are neat things that look spikey and they erode out of the hills. Apparently they're formed in the sea, with the crystals growing out in all directions. Pretty cool and I'll put some pics of them here later if I remember. From the pictures you can kind of see the kind of ground we were digging in, and that there were some pretty steep hills. It was so pretty and it was fun to be out playing today. We spent about 4 hours walking and climbing and hunting around in the dirt for cool rocks. We saw teeth (or some kind of plant but we think its teeth), fossilized shells and, of course, rose rocks. On our way back, we saw lots of prints in the mud in the creek: fox, wolf, muskox, bunny, bird.

We also walked through the forest. There are willow trees here :) Sort of.



And other pretty plants too.
The picture at the top is from our drive up to the lab this afternoon. Some more ice had floated into the fjord and I particularly liked this iceberg. I could have sat there all day, but was only able to for a few minutes before we had to continue up to the lab. We took a quick stop to watch some muskox run away farther up the ridge as well, and then settled in for an afternoon of plumbing and pipe fitting, hooking the chiller and gas lines up to our laser.

All in all, a very good day!