Today was a great day in the field! We were able to get out to the lab at a reasonable hour and get our communications set up between the instruments. The station weather was crystal clear but chilly (about -20 degC). We could finally see our surroundings and it was beautiful! There are rolling hills which makes the drive to the GAS lab interesting. The colors in the sky are vibrant, lots of purples and pinks and only a shallow glow from the sun on the horizon. We also saw lots of small animal tracks on our drive, lots of bunnies and foxes. There is about a foot of snow on the ground already, and walking to and from the lab leaves a frost around the hood of our jackets… great for those classic Arctic field work photos 😉 (more of those photos to come once we are able to connect our cameras to the computer!)
The GAW science facility is about 7 km south of the main station. We drive pickup trucks with Trax on them instead of tires. We park the trucks about 150 yards from the GAW lab and walk the rest of the way in so as to not disturb the air measurements and samples being collected at the lab.
We began the challenge of figuring out how to mount our instruments on the outdoor structures near the GAW lab. Hopefully tomorrow we can work some more on this project and get the instruments installed on their structures starting Monday. The cold temps make this task quite difficult… as long as it isn’t too windy I think we should be able to make this happen.
We are excited to get our instruments up on the structures and our measurements collected. Yay science!
All the best,
The Arctic Team
