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 that point, each of us lidar team members trained to be able to operate the two lidar systems independently, and we we entered operation mode.
In order to capture all the data possible, we split the team into a “day shift” and a “night shift” each being responsible for data collection and system maintenance during that portion of the day. Of course, these were not concrete and we would shift things around during periods of poor weather (low data collection) or when maintenance/training required a different schedule.
In October, we spent nearly the first two weeks of the month capturing data almost non-stop! With the exception of maybe one or two days, we took data for at least part of every single day/night. This was great practice to implement our training and identify areas in which each of us could improve our operational skills. Overall, October 2022 yielded over 250 hours of data in total, which is great as October is historically a month prone to poor weather and we have less data than other months, so this year added some very valuable measurements to our archives.
November is starting now, and we’re hoping for similarly cooperative data and similar performance from the lidar team to make for another month of valuable data collection!
