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

This summer has been full of training and preparation for this fall’s McMurdo deployment, but we are taking a few weeks in June to share our research results with the community at a series of back-to-back conferences! This years annual Coupling, Energetics, and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) Workshop is held in Austin, TX in… Read More

Moving a storage container is a tricky process, and it’s even trickier when it’s 4 containers holding a lidar transmitter and 3 massive telescopes! One of our lidar systems has been housed on NOAA’s Table Mountain site for years, but we were finally able to move it to a more accessible location on campus, meaning… Read More

Earlier this year, Ian and I were selected to receive a Travel Fellowship from the WAVE group, a NASA DRIVE Science Center based out of LASP which funded our travel to Frankfurt, Germany for the 2022 SPARC Gravity Wave Symposium. This is an international group of researchers studying gravity waves in every way from modeling… Read More

On 29th December, a day after his birthday Yingfei and Dr. Chu were having a regular meeting session discussing his research on Sodium data retrieval when they discovered the Boulder TINa layers – a phenomenon earlier only seen in the Antarctic atmosphere, now observed in Boulder a mid-latitude location for the very first time. Little… Read More

On October 10th, Dr. Chu and I (Jackson) submitted a manuscript of a study, led by me, to AGU’s Earth and Space Science journal. This study is titled “Comparison of Three Methodologies for Removal of Random-Noise-Induced Biases From Second-Order Statistical Parameters of Lidar and Radar Measurements”. This paper studies the application of multiple different bias-correction… Read More