Antarctic UAVs

16 January 2014

We woke to cloudy skies and fog for our first full day at our Tall Tower field camp. Our first order of business was to finish unpacking our sleds and getting our camp set up. For breakfast we had oatmeal and hot cocoa.

Ben, the Kiwi grad student with us, joined us on our trip to the Tall Tower field camp so that he could to setup two Snow Web automatic weather stations (AWS) for us. These AWS are intended for short-term deployments, unlike the AWS I’ve deployed in the past that get setup for many years at a time. Both types of AWS measure the same things – temperature, humidity, pressure, and wind.

After lunch Ben, Melissa, and I took the snowmobiles to setup the two Snow Web AWS 6 miles south and west of our camp. These weather stations will provide us with information about how the weather varies around our camp and will let us put our unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) observations into a broader weather context.

When we left to install the AWS it was still cloudy and the light was very flat. In fact, heading away from camp it was impossible to see any detail on the surface at all. It is very disorienting to be traveling across a landscape where there are no landmarks – it was flat in every direction – and where you can’t see any detail on the ground in front of you. Several times as we were riding towards the site for the Snow Web AWS it felt like we were riding off of the edge of the earth. Without landmarks it is very hard to even travel in a straight line and I had to rely on my GPS to make sure that we traveled due south and then due west of our main camp.

I was very impressed with how quick and easy the Snow Web AWS were to install. It was obvious that a lot of thought and care went into designing these AWS. It took us less than an hour to install the first AWS and just a bit more than a half hour to install the second.

As we returned to our field camp the light improved a little bit as the clouds lifted and it was now possible to see the snow drifts in front of us. We could also see the Tall Tower AWS on the horizon and this gave us a landmark that we could steer towards rather than relying solely on our GPS to tell us which way to go. In such a barren environment something as simple as a single landmark on the horizon makes a big difference.

Thanks for reading.

John