13 January 2014 Melissa and I have spent the last few days getting ready for spending the next two weeks at our Tall Tower field camp. We’ve finished picking up all of our camp gear (tents, sleeping bags, stoves, fuel, generator, solar panel, food), testing and packing all of our science gear, and of course… Read More

9 January 2014 My flight to Antarctica left Christchurch, New Zealand Tuesday morning (7 January) at just after 9:30AM. For this trip I flew in a ski-equipped military cargo plane, known as an LC-130,  operated by the US Air Force National Guard.   One of the crew members had a patch on his uniform that… Read More

To Antarctica – Again 6 January 2014 Once again I am on my way to Antarctica to study the weather of the southernmost continent. This trip is my 12th to Antarctica. You can read about some of my previous trips at the following links: August – October 2012 http://cires.colorado.edu/blogs/antarcticuavs/ January – February 2012 http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53700947/Antarctic_blog/index.html August… Read More

My 10th trip to Antarctica ended on Monday (1 October) when I flew back to New Zealand. I was happy that our northbound flight left as scheduled since sometimes these flights can be delayed several days or more if the weather doesn’t cooperate. The flight that arrived from New Zealand on Monday was the start… Read More

The Aerosonde UAVs we flew in Antarctica were equipped with digital cameras that allowed us to take photographs of the ice and ocean we were flying over. Of course, most of our flights were at night so we couldn’t take photographs, but on a few flights we had enough daylight at the start of the… Read More

Since my last blog post we’ve been busy flying our Aerosondes to Terra Nova Bay. After our first successful flights on the night of the 18th we launched two more Aerosondes to Terra Nova Bay for overnight flights on the 19th. All was going well with these flights until the generator belt on one of… Read More

We completed our first successful Aerosonde UAV science flights to Terra Nova Bay last night and we are all really happy to finally be getting the data we’ve come here for. Nick, Cam, Peter, and I went out to the Pegasus ice runway yesterday afternoon to launch two Aerosondes for the overnight mission. You can… Read More

It has been a busy, but frustrating, week since I last wrote. We’ve been working hard trying to get our UAVs to Terra Nova Bay to make the measurements we need for our research but we keep running into problems. After our local test flight last Sunday (9 September) we had a couple of days… Read More

After what seems like a long wait we’ve finally had our first Aerosonde flight yesterday. While we haven’t completed a science flight yet we are getting closer to that goal. Everything always seems to take longer than you expect down here and this trip has been no different. Since we arrived two weeks are we’ve… Read More

In my earlier blog posts I’ve been complaining that the weather here in McMurdo hasn’t been Antarctic enough for my liking but today the weather has “improved” quite a bit and is much more “enjoyable”. We’ve had condition 2 weather on and off all day since lunch. Many of the buildings in McMurdo have electronic… Read More