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
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
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
We finally got to fly down on August 28 after 11 days of being delayed! We almost got to fly on Saturday the 27th, all got dressed up in our warm clothes ready to head to the airport, and got a call from the hotel telling us to postpone things another day. After the hectic… Read More
Spending a week in New Zealand might sound like a great “last week” before heading to the ice! Problem is, July 31 is when NZ opened their borders, and it didn’t take long for COVID to spread around the city. As such, our week in NZ has been spent cooped up in the hotel rooms… Read More
The so-called “Ice Flight” is always an unpredictable one. Due to changing weather conditions and the remoteness of the Antarctic station, the flight carrying us from Christchurch to McMurdo can be, and often is, delayed. Usually delays are due to weather conditions, and the flight can be cancelled at any time, even sometimes when the… Read More
We set off on our long trip down to Christchurch today to begin the 2022 Winter Flight (Winfly) season at McMurdo Station. The itinerary starts off with a flight from Denver to Houston, then we take the 15-hr long flight from Houston to Auckland, and finally we fly from Auckland to Christchurch. The hardest part… Read More
After we arrived home from the CEDAR conference, we had a one-day break before logging on for the virtual 30th International Laser Radar Conference (ILRC30). Ian Geraghty, Arunima Prakash, and Yingfei Chen presented their work in an oral session to a large crowd of “topis” (the virtual users on this platform), drawing intriguing and helpful… Read More
Everyone’s talks and poster presentations went very well! We all spoke on Friday right before the end of the conference in Dr. Chu’s session, and everyone got especially good comments and questions from the attending researchers. We also got to visit with good friends and researchers from other institutions, which is one of the best… Read More
