Antarctica 2012: September 3, 2012

Hi all - It's September now, and with that brings more sunlight. The sun is now up almost 8 hours per day, which is an increase of about 2 hours since I got here a week ago. The weather has been mostly ok - temperatures around 1 or 2F, so really not too chilly. When that wind picks up though, the wind chill can drop rapidly.

Here I am out at Hut Point yesterday. The temperature wasn't too cold (I think it was around 1F), but the wind was really blowing - probably 10-15 mph, and so it was pretty chilly.

We are still waiting to get out to the nearby airfield to fly our planes, but it looks like we'll be out there tomorrow or Wednesday. I can't remember if I mentioned what I'm doing here or not, so now seems as good a time as any. In a nutshell, we are here to fly small, remote control planes that will take measurements of the atmosphere and help us to understand the weather in some really interesting areas of the Antarctic. We are primarily focused on an area called Terra Nova Bay, which is about 300 km (~200 miles) to the north of where I am right now. The reason this area is so interesting is because there's an area of open ocean water (called a polynya) that forms there and stays open for a lot of the winter period. If you can imagine living on a lake and the lake never freezes over in the winter, you'd probably find that pretty neat. Well, having that open water can really impact the cold air (especially in the Antarctic winter time) that overlies the polynya, and so we want to take measurements of that air and try and understand how the atmosphere is changing because of this open water. As I mentioned, I'm here with five other people - John (my advisor), and four people who build the small planes (Nick, Paul, Peter, and Cameron). These planes, called Aerosonde unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), can fly for 18 hours and cover a lot of distance to make these measurements. John, Nick, Peter, and Paul were here in 2009 flying the Aerosonde UAVs.

Here's a photo John took of one of the Aerosonde UAVs back in 2009.

Here's John and the SUMOs when he was here in January.
The small white plane is the toy test plane.

John and I are also planning to use even smaller UAVs, called SUMOs (small unmanned meteorological observers) and take measurements of the atmosphere at locations more local to where we are in McMurdo. There are a lot of interesting weather features in Antarctica in the winter, as well as a lot of topography nearby, that will be great to use the SUMOs to measure. The SUMOs can only fly about 30 minutes at a time, but we should get a lot of really interesting information about the complexities of the wintertime weather in this region. The SUMOs John and I get to fly ourselves (as opposed to the Aerosonde UAVs that require a team to fly), so I've been practicing with a flight simulator the last couple of days to warm up, and then will also practice on a test plane before I do the real thing. So far I've been doing pretty well with the flight simulator, but we'll see what happens when I touch the toy plane.

While we're waiting, I've been keeping myself busy. I accompanied Paul to open volleyball a few days ago, and I had a really, really good time doing that. They play every Tuesday and Thursday, so hopefully I can get out there again. I've also done some walking around and taking pictures, so I will finish this post with a few I took yesterday of the sunset. I tried to get out and take some night pictures, but it didn't work out yesterday. Hopefully I can do this soon.

One last thing - John wrote up a really nice summary on his blog of what life is like here in McMurdo, and rather than post the same thing twice, if you're interested I'd check this out http://cires.colorado.edu/blogs/antarcticuavs/. Our dorm rooms look pretty similar and we are sharing an office, so you can get a sense of what my life is like here also. And now, pictures!