December 26, 2010  |   

The Christmas 2010 at McMurdo was marked by nice, warm and clear weather, delicious Christmas dinner, and the hard work of the lidar team at Arrival Heights. It’s certainly an unforgettable one!

Excited by the preliminary results of our 24-48 hours of continuous lidar data, the lidar team members were determined to collect more data while optimizing the lidar system during the Christmas weekend from Friday 12/24/2010 to Monday morning 12/27/2010. Everyone contributed significantly, and I tuned my schedule to work with the winter-over PhD student Zhibin Yu in the lidar operations. This provides us more opportunities to go through the lidar principles, technologies, and in particular the Fe Boltzmann lidar system in more details. I’m very delighted that Zhibin is making significant progress. In the meantime, we utilize short group meetings to discuss issues occurred during the lidar operations and optimization so that students and research scientist can learn more about lidar, and we can update the lidar operation procedure and check list to make them more suitable for the new environment.

Working on Christmas Day (12/25/2010) at Arrival Heights provided us an opportunity to watch the Mount Erebus injecting smoke into the air.

By the night of 12/25-26/2010, Mt. Erebus became very quite as shown in the background of this photo. Zhibin was very happy during the lidar operation as he received a gift from me – the T-shirt of “I’ve spent time on the dark side of Antarctica”. Wait, not yet! He will be spending time on the dark side of Antarctica!

Also taken the very warm night of 12/25 when the wind was really calm. The sea ice surrounding Ross Island is breaking up.

Here, I am pointing to a lava-formed rock, most likely formed by a major eruption of Mt. Erebus long time ago.                                   

The Kiwi’s Building at Arrival Heights where our lidar is installed. It looks very nice under the Christmas weather.

USAP’s Van 203 was lent to my team by the Shuttle Operation at McMurdo. Because there wasn’t shuttle service during the Christmas holidays from Friday 6:30pm to Sunday 6pm, we drove by ourselves in order to work at Arrival Heights. Thus, I gained my first-ever experience of driving a van in Antarctica! It’s a piece of cake in summer season, but I wouldn’t say the same thing for winter. Zhibin was so happy for us to have a van (even only for two days), but he is going to face a great challenge of driving to and from Arrival Heights in winter.

As mentioned in the 5th week report, the EMI from the lidar to existing VLF/ELF experiments is a serious issue. This is the first time that we have experienced EMI (electromagnetic interference) problems in nearly 30 years of operating lidars at various sites around the world, including at RF sensitive military installations and on aircraft. In fact, the Fe Boltzmann lidar was operated satisfactorily, without EMI effects, on several major airborne campaigns using the NCAR Electra and for almost 3-years at the South Pole where the radio telescopes are especially sensitive to EMI. Thus, it is quite surprising (and disappointing) to Chet and me that we are now experiencing this difficulty at Arrival Heights. We are working hard to solve it.

Standing on the roof of the Kiwi’s building, we tried to determine how much EM emission has escape the building. Putting my fingers on the antenna did help to tune in the spectrum analyzer to detect the very low frequency (1-50 kHz).

The USAP communication engineer helped us diagnose exactly what was causing the trouble on Friday, 12/24/2010. It’s inconclusive yet, and the issue is complicated because there isn’t good earth grounding in Antarctica, and there are also non-lidar EMI sources.

The Christmas dinner was wonderful – lobster and duck meats, especially considering C-17 flights weren’t able to fly in before Christmas. We all enjoyed the food and the conversations with several friends at McMurdo. There were lots of celebrations going on at the station, and people deserved them. They all have been working very hard.

Our Christmas dinner food …

Happy faces after wine and lots of lobsters! A friend of ours, the science support lead at McMurdo, shared this moment with us, and together we shouted “Down the EMI”!

Since we didn’t have a real break (except the Christmas dinner for three hours) during the Christmas weekend, I decided to give the team a break on the evening of Monday, December 27th. Wentao, Weichun, and Zhibin did recreation by hiking to Castle Rock. After two hours of sleep, I took a walk to the Discovery Hut trail for some physical exercise. Walking on the rocky trail reminds me of the hiking I did with my parents on the Mesa trail in Boulder. The feelings are very similar, except there aren’t any trees (or even plants) on Ross Island.

Tuesday is a new day, and we will work to meet the challenges …

Happy holidays!

Xinzhao