First day of work

Wednesday, 18 May was the first actual day of work at ALOMAR, the Arctic Lidar Observatory for Middle Atmospheric Research. At 8:00 I met Zuguang Guan, my supervisor for my time in Norway, and some other Alomar scientists for the drive up there. The view from the top is even more spectacular than the view from my room, which might make it hard for me to concentrate on my work.

The lidar I was supposed to be using, a "portable" lidar managed by Yale professor Trude Storelvmo (my senior thesis advisor), from a company called "Leosphere", is having problems: the supposedly waterproof laser head (the portion containing the laser) filled with water in Martinique, when it rained. The lidar is being shipped back to the Leosphere company in France, who will perform watertightness checks on the laser head. If the laser itself is not damaged, the lidar may make it to Andenes in about 4 weeks, but if the laser is damaged, then it will take much longer to repair, and will not be ready before I leave. In any caase, one of Alomar's permanent lidars (the one which studies the troposphere--the lower 10 km or so of the atmosphere--rather than the stratosphere) has the same wavelength as "our" lidar, so using them both at the same time would cause interference. So a plan B was necessary for how to occupy my time here.

Trude was visiting her family in Narvik, Norway for the past couple days and arrived in Andenes today, hiking from the Rocket Range (where I'm staying), at sea level, up to Alomar--at 1000+ foot elevation--on foot because she got here after all the carpools. The Plan B we came up with was for me to learn to run Alomar's permanent tropospheric lidar, and analyze the data the same way I would've done for the Yale lidar. If the Yale lidar does come in midway through my time here, I'll set it up at the Rocket Range rather than at Alomar to avoid interference. That should provide some interesting additional information as we can see how different the measurements are between the two different instruments.

I also tried to get back into the analysis of the data from the Domex field campaign in Martinique, which I started for my Cloud Physics and Dynamics class final project. The final project produced very interesting and counterintuitive results but only included some of the Domex research flights. I wanted to add the rest of the flights now that the field campaign has concluded, but I found that access to the data has now been restricted. I'm now awaiting the password.

After returning to the Rocket Range, Trude, along with her husband and toddler son, took me first to the grocery store (where I bought some much needed items, and really appreciated Trude's guidance because I couldn't understand the Norwegian packaging), then out to dinner in Andenes, in a restaurant called "The Arrest" built in the old jail. This was really nice as it was the first real meal I've had since getting here, and it was very good food. Andenes seemed to be a really quiet, sleepy town. After returning to the Rocket Range, I went with Trude's husband to try to drive a stickshift car, which I'll need to learn (along with 4WD training) in order to drive the Alomar cars so I can go to the grocery store myself. My first attempts failed miserably but after a while I vaguely started to get the hang of it. Still, this is too difficult to learn in one day and I'll have to find someone else to teach me once Trude and company leave.

Tomorrow, Trude will take me to the wireless store to get a temporary cell phone, if possible (since American phones operate on different frequencies than European ones; this time the problem is different frequencies rather than the same frequency), and also to the sporting goods store to buy a bike helmet. Biking is the only way besides driving or walking 3 miles to get from the Rocket Range to town (to buy groceries, etc.) I won't ride without a helmet even though it's not required here.

I meant to post this on Wednesday but there was a system-wide Internet outage that affected both the Rocket Range, where I'm staying, and the Alomar observatory where I work. So I had to copy it to a file and wait.