IceChaser: Chasing Snow in Antarctica

Some of you may recall from last year that Thanksgiving is not celebrated on Thanksgiving day here in McMurdo, but is instead celebrated on the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Work weeks here are 6 days long (Monday through Saturday) with Sunday as the one day of the week designated as a "weekend". While it may sound terrible, it's really not that bad and no one seems to mind working the extra day. To avoid interrupting the work week, major holidays are always celebrated on Saturdays so people can enjoy a 2-day weekend. As part of the Thanksgiving holiday, there is always a 5k Turkey Trot race that begins at 10am Saturday morning. The Turkey Trot starts in McMurdo and goes about halfway to Scott Base (the New Zealand base on the other side of the hill) and back again. The Turkey Trot is always "something not to miss" and usually looks like Halloween crashed Thanksgiving's party. Many of the participants dress in some sort of costume to run the race and th...

It's been a busy, but very productive, couple of weeks now. We've now been to all four sites and have completed work at one (Tall Tower), nearly completed work at two others (Phoenix and Lorne) and the fourth (Willie) is about halfway done. We are actually running a bit ahead of schedule (almost unheard of down here, especially since other projects have been waiting almost a month to start due to bad weather in other locations around the continent) and still have two weeks to go. One of my earlier blogs talked about Phoenix where the shield was falling apart. We took another trip dedicated to getting Phoenix ready for the winter and it took Mark and I another three hours of work at the site to get most everything back in shape for the next winter season. This included raising the white box that houses the data logger and the electronics as well as the precipitation detection sensor and the snow depth sensor. The precipitation detection sensor was less than a foot above the sn...

Now that training is out of the way, we have been able to make it to two of our sites: Willie and Phoenix. As I alluded to in one of my prior blogs (and as you likely surmised from the title of this post), we had some surprises that awaited us. I'll start with Willie. As some of you might recall from my posts last year, Willie is our premier site because of its close proximity to McMurdo (it's the closest of the four sites) and because of it hosts three precipitation gauges instead of one. One of those gauges was surrounded by a Double Fence Intercomparison Reference (DFIR), and the other two were surround by a type of double Alter shield. We use shields around the gauges to slow the wind so the snow falls more vertically into the gauge instead of blowing past it. The DFIR is considered the standard but it's large ... 40 feet in diameter to be exact. The double Alter shields are smaller (with a maximum of 8 feet in diameter) and we installed both types of shields at Willie ...