End of 2nd week: Snow, Volcanoes and Reindeer

It snowed on the mountaintops on Wednesday night, and again on Thursday while I was at Alomar. When I got home that day it was sleeting outside my window, even at sea level. This was the latest in the season that I'd seen any kind of wither weather. Hopefully it will get warmer soon.

Snow on the mountaintops

Not much more has happened work-wise, since programming the data analysis routines is more difficult than I expected. The repairs for the lidar instrument I was supposed to be using are taking even longer than expected, although Trude "hasn't given up hope" that it will get here before I leave. In any case, I need a new direction for the work I'll be doing for my time here; hopefully I'll know more after Zuguang gets back from his conference, which should be tomorrow. One potential area of interest would be to study the recent  eruption of the Grimsvotn volcano in Iceland. There was a rare break in the cloudy weather on Friday afternoon, allowing the Alomar people to make measurements with their big tropospheric lidars, and the ash cloud from the volcano should be visible in the lidar profiles. I might be able to use the "depolarization ratio" (how much the backscattered light has been changed from its original, polarized state) to determine what part of the signal is from hexagonal ice crystals in cirrus clouds (higher depolarization) and what part is from the more spherical ash particles (lower depolarization). 



Alomar on a rare sunny day



View of Andenes from Alomar

Arve is putting the finishing touches on his master's thesis, and is leaving on Tuesday. Today, he was going to Bleik, the village a few miles to the south of the rocket range, to see it one last time before he left, and take pictures. He offered to take me with him and I gladly accepted, not having gone there yet. The most important thing about Bleik is the fact that there's a bakery and convenience store there that is actually open on Sundays, so I'll know where to go if I completely run out of food. It's really expensive though, like everything else in this country but probably more so than in the supermarkets. I paid 15 kroner (about $3) for a donut, chocolate-frosted. The town also had the tallest trees I've seen on this island, reaching a height of about 20 feet, and a long beach which is much nicer than the one right by the rocket range.

Crab shell, at the beach at Bleik

Bleik (I'll post more pictures on the Flickr page, I'm just experimenting with putting pictures on the blog)

Since Arve is leaving soon, some of the people staying here (Arve, the Australians, another American on a brief visit at Alomar, and I) had a dinner of reindeer stew, apparently a delicacy here, if the price is any indication. This was the first time I'd ever eaten reindeer (which is an actual type of animal (also known as caribou), not a mythological creature), or any kind of deer. It tasted good but it's hard to describe. A lean meat, maybe a bit like beef.