After four flights on Saturday, Pilatus had a tailwheel issue that kept us grounded for the rest of that evening. However, on Sunday morning the airplane was again ready to go, and so were we. With (relatively) light winds around 15 mph, I was excited to continue to collect good measurements — the sun was even… Read More
After making the decision to extend the campaign by a couple of days, the team was optimistic and ready to go this morning. We woke up to find that winds had dropped to around 15–20 mph, just as forecast. We set out for the AMF-3 early to get all of our equipment up and… Read More
The last two days have been spent agonizing over whether to extend the campaign or not. I’ll be very honest and say that the first two weeks have been disappointing. It is very challenging to watch your window of opportunity grow smaller and smaller and repeatedly have forecasts trend towards higher and higher winds.… Read More
Winds were howling again and we were under a blizzard warning starting at around noon today. This is supposed to keep up through tomorrow afternoon, meaning that we are doing what we can on the ground, sampling aerosols with POPS and making sure that our equipment is ready. The aerosol sampling is interesting in… Read More
Yesterday we set out for the AMF-3 prepared to stay for the entire day and into the evening, just in case the forecast drop in winds came true. For a very short while, it looked as though it might… By mid-morning we started regularly seeing winds around 25 mph (which was down from 35–50… Read More
Today has been forecast to be a bad one for quite some time, and so far it’s living up to expectations. Since there was no chance of flights today, I decided we’d have a down day at the camp. Al and I drove over to Kuparuk camp, about 20 minutes from here, because both… Read More
We arrived on the north slope a week ago, and now have one week until we likely head home. Some campaigns go very quickly — this is generally the case when you are flying many, many flights or, alternatively, when your equipment is failing you and you are spending a lot of time and energy troubleshooting… Read More
Another interesting day at Oliktok — one day I would love to have a few of the (seemingly) boring, go-through-the-motions days that we seem to be able to reproduce readily when flying in Boulder! We decided to switch up the schedule a bit today, taking a lunch with us so that we could stay through… Read More
The weather continues to be nasty up here. This morning at breakfast, the winds looked ever-so-slightly better, so we decided we would put energy into DataHawk flights today, while also continuing to obtain aerosol measurements from POPS on the roof top of the AMF-3. For those who followed our adventures last summer, you… Read More
I didn’t provide a blog entry yesterday — I wish I could say that was because the weather broke and we had a fantastic day of flying, but I can’t. Winds are still howling at 30–40 mph as I type this, and access to the site has been limited due to drifting snow on the way… Read More
