Fri., June 27: The Wind is Killing Me!

"Ain't no Green in Greenland!"

This is a phrase Max (UCLA), and I came up with tonight for his blog for the UCLA student newspaper. We think it is really funny, but maybe that's because we are surrounded by snow!

So I slept very well last night. I slept from about 12am until 6am but didn't get up until about 8am. The wind was really whipping last night, and I thought the tent might come down. When I arrived at my tent last night, the front was covered half way up with snow! I had to dig my way through about three feet of snow...thank goodness it was light outside! I was very worried when I woke up at 6am that I would get snowed in! Last year, it took Katrine (UC-Irvine) 10 minutes to get out of her tent because of snow drift. But I remembered that I had a pocket knife, and if it came down to it, I could cut my way out...so I went back to sleep. :)

This morning I had an orange and some banana nut bread with chocolate chips. It is amazing how fresh the fruit is here! You would think they were growing it locally!

Today the winds have been ranging from 15mph to 31mph, which is too high for our tethered balloon (orange Nemo fish looking thing in the pictures) because it is attached to a rope and would be uncontrollable. Craig (Montana) and I figured we could attemp to fly it but a) the balloon would fly away b) we could hold onto the balloon and get dragged across the ice sheet likely never returning c) we could be really cool and go out to the runway wearing skis and get dragged across, but still likely not returning or d) not fly until it the winds are closer to 10 knots. We took a run at choice b), and I am sorry to report we lost Ben our undergraduate student. He did live 18 glorious years. We'll miss you buddy.

The wind is killing me! Not only is it not allowing us to fly the tethersonde, but we walk everywhere so talk about wind burn! Walking away from the Big House is great because we are walking with the wind, but walking to the Big House takes about ten more minutes because of the wind! Grrrrrr

The winds are predominantly from the North or Northeast, which is definitely frustrating a lot of people at Summit because that brings "camp pollution" from the generator and any flight that may come in at that time. Climatologically speaking, the winds are generally out of the southeast so this is definitely irregular, but has been presisting for about 8 days.

All of our instruments are running smoothly (knock on wood!). I have continued to back up all of the data at least once daily. Cables 3 and 4 of the snow spectroradiometer had to be reinserted into the snow because of the snow drift resulting from the high winds. Because we have not been able to fly the tethersonde, I have a little extra time on my hands to devote to data analysis. For example, this afternoon I did an in depth analysis of the state of the boundary layer on June 24th. On this particular day, most of the science groups saw interesting features (e.g. high levels of BrO). Our data showed that the boundary layer was very stable and had moist layer beginning at just below 50m. The group hypothesized after seeing some days with high BrO concentrations last year that the BrO was being produced photochemically in the snow (this is one reason why we are measuring the spectral irradiance at 5 depths within the snow). During stable conditions, the BrO remains close to the surface. So hopefully our intense boundary layer measurements will help everyone out too!

Oh yeah, today my friend Jin (GA Tech) gave everyone out at satellite camp some dried squid. I am always up for trying things at least once (grant it, the piece I chose was about 1/2 an inch long!), but ooooooooooh I didn't like it! It was very "fishy" to say the least. Everyone at the camp nick named it squid jerky. Although it kind of looked like onion straws! It is funny because the night before we left for Kanger, Greenland from Schnectady, NY, Jin and I went to an Italian restaurant. Needless to say she didn't like the place I picked out! So I guess we are even!

Congratulations to Liz Johnson for getting the trivia question correct last night (although I might need a little convincing that she didn't look it up!)!

Current weather:
14F with a -3F wind chill

For dinner tonight we had:
grilled tuna steaks with pineapple salsa, roasted potatoes, steamed cauliflower, salad, veggie soup, beef soup, homemade bread, Lemon Raspberry Cakes (surprisingly yummy even though I don't like lemon too much)

Smell-oh-Meter: 3.75...not too much of an increase today...thanks to the cold and the fact that you cannot get dirty here (everything is water (frozen), no dirt or soot)

Well, I guess that's all FOLKS!