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!