With the handover underway the only way to learn the met job is just to get stuck right in. And this week has seen me doing exactly that. The 'bread and butter' work starts with a met balloon launch in the morning.
This is followed by a synoptic meteorological observation at 09:00 which is repeated every three hours during the day. In amongst this an upper atmosphere ozone measurement is taken with the Dobson Spectrophotometer. It was at Halley that the Ozone hole was originally discovered in the mid 80's. This experiment is one of the most important long term experiments that BAS runs.
The summer period is a very busy period for science too. The Antarctic Survey has a lot of automated experiments at remote locations around the Brunt Ice Shelf and beyond. During the year these automated experiments get buried in snow and it is a summer task to visit all the remote sites, dig them out and then re-establish them on top of the snow ready for another years operation.
I've already made two visits, spade in hand, to dig out a couple of sites. The first visit was to the VLF antenna. This site had to be raised and the cables tidied. It's only 2km away so we've been able to chip away at this job as and when time allows. The raising should be completed within the next couple of days.
The close proximity of the VLF site afforded us the opportunity to utilise some mechanical assistance. A far better option than a spade. The picture below also demonstrates 'poor contrast' where the cloud cover diffuses the sunlight resulting in there being no shadows cast. This has the effect of flattening the vista resulting in a limited horizon and making it difficult to see topographical features in the snow. Poor contrast can be quite dangerous as one could inadvertently walk then fall right into a great big hole. Holes similar in size to the ones I've spent the past couple of days digging.
The A10 site was about 10km away and due to it's remote location the site had to be raised in one session. The A10 site is a GPS experiment that monitors the movement of the Brunt Ice Shelf. Numerous of these GPS experiments exist at specific locations across the shelf. The array of GPS experiments enables scientists to monitor the current state of the ice shelf and to model it's future movement. Four of us went out to raise A10.
We dug a great big hole to recover the buried system components such as the battery boxes. These boxes contain lead acid batteries so once you dig them out you then have to lift them out of your deep hole. Lots of fun for all!
The GPS system consists of a GPS receiver, a radio transceiver, battery boxes for power and a solar panel for charging the batteries during the summer months and a wind turbine that provides power to charge the batteries all year round. Well when the wind blows.....which is very often indeed!
Ryan Anderson (right hand side in the piccy above) is the scientist in charge of the GPS experiments as part of the Lifetime of Halley science programme. The remote, automated GPS system allows him to communicate via radio link with the system to enable him to download the logged GPS data for analysis. However, the system will quite happily log GPS data for about a year without him talking to any of the sites.
It is very possible that the Brunt Ice Shelf will shear from the Antarctic continent one day. Part of Ryan's work is to determine if this will occur, when it will occur and where the Brunt will start to disconnect from the continent..
When it comes to raising any site the general rule of thumb is: dig, dig, dig..........
Which turns this……….
Into this……….
All followed by a superb nights sleep.
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