We awoke before 5 AM on Friday, February 2nd in Christchurch, NZ to shuttle to the USAP Clothing Distribution Center. There, we collected our cold weather gear and prepared to board a US Air Force C-17 cargo plane to McMurdo. The flight was noisy, but legroom was ample, as was the in-flight meal. We stepped… Read More

On Sunday, January 28th, five members of Dr. Chu’s lidar research team began the journey to McMurdo. Two of those five members, Yingfei Chen and Shannen Graham-Howard, are this year’s brave winter-over researchers. The other three, Dr. Chu, Gary Sutliff, and Ari Diddams, will be deployed to McMurdo for about 18 days in February to… Read More

To start a new winter season for 2024, Dr. Chu and I with the other three group members (Shannen, Ari and Gary) met at Houston International Airport and departed United States for New Zealand together. This will be the first time for Shannen, Ari and Gary to reach the Southern Hemisphere, which makes them very… Read More

We met today with Nancy and Gianna at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History to discuss the early stages of designing a museum exhibit sharing the works of our McMurdo lidar campaign! We hope to share our excitement about STEM fields, while educating visitors about geospace and the role that our data plays… Read More

After quite extensive research on the conjugate photoelectrons by Dr. Chu and Yingfei, the rebuttal letter to the reviewers worked and the Boulder predawn TINa paper got accepted finally. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023GL105626 In the future, more comprehensive work should be done before submitting the manuscript. We are looking forward to getting more results published about Boulder TINa… Read More

Greetings from Christchurch, New Zealand!!! I still can’t believe everything! I got the news that I might be deployed to McMurdo Station, Antarctica two weeks ago, now I’m already waiting for my winter flight to the ice in New Zealand. I called Dr. Chu on Thursday at 2:31pm about my New Zealand Visa approval and… Read More

We have been hard at work since the last update, so it has been a while since I’ve posted. Last November, we first noted some strange results in our lidar signal, showing aerosols (suspended particles) from around 15-25 km in the air. This is higher than most clouds, but was out of season for when… Read More

To many “Antarcticans”, Antarctica is simply known as “The Ice”.  Celebrating birthday on the ice is a lucky thing to any Antarctican, and I became one of the lucky Antarcticans on Dec. 28, 2022, who celebrated birthday on the ice! The Chu Lidar Group planned a party for me in Crary library on Wednesday night… Read More

Hello again! As I expected, once we hit the ice we quickly got busy with refurbishment and training to the point where blog updates were on the back of my mind. However, after hard work from the entire team and some long nights, we were able to return to operational capacity by mid-late September! After… Read More

Our major goal was to get to the lidar lab by the end of the month. However, this wasn’t an easy task. Since we arrived in winter, we had a large amount of additional training to do before we were allowed to leave the base on our own. Our training list was: a comms briefing,… Read More