First evening at the lab

Yes, I'm officially a binge blogger. I had some catching up to do.

Last night, after supper, room assignments & unpacking, Zen and I headed over to the 0PAL lab behind the weather station. He works on the E-AERI (it's an interferometer) which is neighbours with the CRL lidar that I work on, so we're lab buddies.

Some things were good finds:
1. The hatch opened. Using the motor. Like it's s'posed to. The heaters were already on.
2. The lab looked happy and clean and things in good shape.
3. It was acceptably toasty in most parts of the building.

On the other hand, I also had it in mind to check whether I had sufficient distilled water remaining to fill the laser's cooling system. I found this:

Yep, sure is. Exactly what it looks like. Frozen solid to the floor.... while the ceiling of the lab was 20 degrees C.

It's good to be back in the lab!

The Dash-8

I seem to have neglected to present the glory that is the Dash-8 airplane. This little (comparatively) luxurious airliner came complete with slightly-less-noise-than-a-dornier-airplane, a stewardess (who was making her first trip further north than Res), two chocolate bars, and speed. We made it to Eureka at about 5:15 PM (convenient because supper was still in the offing at the station), having left YK at 9:00 AM. There's a time difference in there, so it wasn't as long as it seems.

Bus and Plane and Plane and Plane and truck. And a lab.

After a shuttle from London to Toronto, flights through Edmonton to Yellowknife, and overnight stay in a hotel, the Polar Sunrise crew awaits departure from the Arctic Sunwest charter terminal.

The plane ride started out a bit cloudy. Before we gained more altitude than the clouds, we could see rock and trees and a million frozen lakes - a snowmobiler's paradise! 

 

The scenery between Yellowknife and Resolute Bay: Lots of sea ice! It was cloudy for the first while, but then cleared right up and gave clear views of the ground.

 

 The first clear, calm day I think I've ever seen in Res! Good weather DOES exist there (at least for one day). Proof:

 The good thing about good weather in Resolute, particularly if it's a refueling stop that day, is that you're able to take off again. Quite frequently the weather is decent enough to land, but then not good enough to fly out again 20 minutes later. It's also way prettier when it's not socked in and windy and overcast.

Cornwallis Island, near Resolute Bay. So pretty. And you can see how thin our atmosphere is from this perspective, too.

 Home-Sweet-Eureka! The first sighting of the lab from the plane. Can you see Upper Paradise (with its satellite dishes) and the PEARL lab (red building on top of the ridge)? The part of the road that you see leading from the centre of the photo to the lower left heads toward Skull Point. The road to the Weather Station (where we sleep and eat) is on a not-very-visible-in-this-picture road from Upper Paradise down to the lower right.

 

We're Heee-eeer! Our journey ends with the fun activity of loading enormously heavy boxes into pickup trucks for the ride from the Eureka runway to the Weather Station.

 

Lab work is better with goldfish

It's the start of another trip to the Arctic for the 2013 Polar Sunrise Arctic ACE Validation Campaign at Eureka, and the lab work begins long before I catch my 2:30 AM shuttle ride to the airport.

 Between springtime measurement campaigns, I am based at the University of Western Ontario in London. I am analyzing measurement data, writing scientific papers, going to seminar classes, working in our other lidar lab (Purple Crow Lidar) or running outreach programs at the CronynObservatory. With the 2013 campaign approaching, the focus shifts back to lidar measurements from Eureka.

The way I look at the 2012 measurement data changes from “Science! What does this data tell us about the atmosphere?” to “What can this data tell us about how we should run the campaign next time? Should we change any settings? What calibration runs should we do?” My long-distance-labmate Chris Perro (at the aolab at Dalhousie University in Halifax) and I both suggest things, compare notes, and re-visit anything we don't agree on. Our PhD supervisors Prof. Bob Sica and Prof. Tom Duck chime in once we've got a clear plan fleshed out.

This is Chris.

In the weeks leading up to the campaign, I gather all the equipment that I will bring with me. Chris ships any supplies and laser parts to me at Western in a fancy-looking armoured metal case, for me to include in my carry-on luggage This is either “fun” or “a pain” to get through airport security, depending on your sense of humour. I rate it as: More fun than trying to explain to US customs that you're going to work at an electron accelerator lab for the summer without saying the words “work”, “radiation”, “electron”, “nuclear” in your explanation. It is less fun than just packing the darned thing in checked baggage.

My pet goldfish help me unpack and inspect the laser pump chambers. What's a pump chamber? It's the thing that turns energy from regular light into laser light which is all one colour (bright green, in our case) and all headed the same direction. Without it, nothing works. This is a tiny piece of the whole laser setup.

Before packing, I check out all the equipment to make sure that it is all in good shape. The cylindrical rod in the pump chamber is carved from of one long “Nd:YAG” crystal (Neodymium doped with Yttrium, Aluminum and Garnet... it's a transparent and pretty light pink colour). The ends of the rod need to be polished and free from any defects or dirt. 

Feeling like Sherlock Holmes meets CSI, I use my magnifying glass and flashlight to inspect the ends of the laser rod in the pump chamber.

With everything tested and packed, I'm ready for the Northern adventures to begin!

Hello, World!

2011 and 2012 held Arctic ACE Validation Campaigns during the polar sunrise period at Eureka. Blog posts during this time = 0, but rest assured that productivity during these campaigns != 0. The 2012 campaign was actually really productive.

The next post will be back to tourist photos and action shots. For now... here is the poster I presented at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco last December.

I'm back in the Arctic for the 2013 spring campaign, and so is the blog!

Encore des loups

Wolf. There were a bunch wandering around the runway today so we drove up to see them. We went for a walk this morning to find the muskoxen (which are my favourite), but the pictures didn't turn out so well. Even at noon, it's not super bright out anymore, now that the sun has not come up for a few days.

Low-tech zooming - being quiet and letting the wolf wander up to you.

Water Survey

Today Colin and I went out onto the sea ice with a group of people from the station to help out with the weekly Water Survey. Of course, this is the Arctic and it's winter, so most of the "water" isn't very liquid. It was pretty cold out, so we did the throw-the-cup-of-hot-water-in-the-air-and-watch-it-sublimate trick. It had nothing to do with the water survey except that we were outside and it was fun. That's Colin in the picture.
I had a turn too, but it looks like someone made my head invisible in a poof of magic smoke. Actually, come to think of it, all bundled up in my snowsuit my entire self could have become invisible and the picture would look the same, I think! Anyways, that was just for fun. Next came the work.


Every Friday, the met tech has to take an auger onto the ice, drill a hole down to the bottom, and measure the ice thickness. We drove out in a truck to a spot about 100 m off shore. I asked how they do the first few measurements in the fall, when they're not too sure whether the ice is thick enough to walk on yet. Answer: whoever measures the ice does so with a rope tied around them. Not kidding.


Result: 48 cm. Plenty for trucks. You measure by dropping this metal stick down through the hole. The stick has a wire and a tape measure attached, and you yank those until the stick gets caught horizontally across the bottom of the hole. Then you measure. Then you let one end go down so that you can pull the stick back up through the hole.

The hole in the ice filled in pretty quickly with slush. I tested with my hand to see how cold the water was, and let me tell you - I'm glad I wasn't swimming in it!