by Matthew Shupe, CIRES/NOAA scientist and co-coordinator of MOSAiC

Lately there has been a series of challenges. This is the way it usually goes as we set up suites of instruments; some details inevitably go wrong. And then we are faced with diagnosing the issues, trying to isolate the causes and then fixing the problems. Fortunately, in the last days our series of issues has mostly been of the simpler variety. Sometimes an easy fix, or a reinstallation does the trick. We check for continuity of signals to isolate where something is going wrong. Sometimes it is simply a power connectivity issue; you have to make sure that your device is turned on! (Ok, it’s a little more complicated than that… but can be this simple sometimes.) Jackson and I have lists on the white board of all our issues and details to address. Each day we take on a few of these. On a typical day we successfully erase a couple of items from these lists… and then maybe add a new item or two that crop up over the day. Slowly we make progress in the right direction. Operations have actually been quite successful so far. Lots of equipment has been installed in a challenging environment. We are almost fully operational, at least as operational as we can get given the constraints of this particular floe and this time of the year.