MOSAiC

Some people from the media team called it “the most professional operation they’ve seen so far” out here. Maybe it was the team safety meeting just before, or all of the careful planning over many days leading up to now.But now we have a met tower standing proudly out at Met City. All systems go, monitoring the lowest part of the atmosphere. It has been a long time coming and a lot of work. For the teams out here, Dave Costa (CIRES scientist working in NOAA’s Physical Sciences Division) and I did a lot of the initial set up. Ola Persson (also CIRES/NOAA scientist) came back from installing the distributed network on the Federov and has stepped into a key role; he has a particularly careful approach to assessing the instruments to ensure that we are making the best measurements we can. Of course there are so many others involved in making it all happen. The raising today was a major group effort with seven people directly involved. That tower is heavy, so more hands made for quick and safe work. Clearly our practice tower-raising sessions back in Boulder also paid off, as everything went off without a hitch. Today is the official first day of operational science, and we got our met tower up just in time for that.