Saturday, December 31, 2016

Happy New Year!

31 Dec 2016


For New Year's 2000, tickets were sold for a flight aboard the Concorde that started with a midnight celebration in Paris.  Passengers then boarded the plane, which could beat the rotation of the earth, and landed in New York to see midnight again.

That's cute, but I can circumnavigate the planet on foot in less than a minute.  

As I write this, it is 2 hours to midnight on 31 Dec (New Zealand Time).  We'll be celebrating the New Year every hour down here.  Head out to the pole, and take one step further to the right and you're in the next time zone.

Cheers!

Thursday, December 1, 2016

What would you say... ya do here?

1 Dec 2016


So what exactly does my job entail?  I am the station technician for NOAA's south pole climate observatory.  One of two NOAA staff members down here for the next year.  We have about 2 dozen instruments here devoted to monitoring the driving forces of earth's climate.  We monitor several atmospheric trace gases, some at sensitivities of parts per *trillion*.  We monitor the total radiation flux being delivered to the earth from the sun at multiple wavelengths, and quantify the amount of that radiation which is reflected back by the earth.  We measure the thickness of the ozone layer over the south pole daily, and we launch balloons to obtain spatially resolved ozone profiles from the ground up to altitudes of around 35 km.

That sounds very grandiose, but what do I actually do?  My office is in the Atmospheric Research Observatory (ARO, pronounced "arrow") about 500m from the station.  Seriously, check out that link.  Note that the floor plans are links to photos of the interior of ARO.  They're way out of date, but they'll serve.  We'll update them this year.  When things are going smoothly (which they do most of the time), I walk out to ARO every day and run through our daily checks.  We verify every instrument is running fine, that all the data has been transferred successfully the last time the satellites were up (overnight these days).  We have several large tanks of compressed gases, and we monitor them all daily to ensure the tanks are swapped out for full ones before they run out.

After the dailies are done, every day we need to do multiple measurements of the total column thickness of the ozone layer.  We use a Dobson differential spectrophotometer to do this.  The Dobson is a fascinating instrument, and will get its own post at some point.

On weekly and monthly periodicities, various instruments need to be recalibrated or have maintenance tasks performed.  Every two weeks, we collect literal samples of air in pressurized bottles.  These will be kept on station during the winter and mailed back to our collaborators in Australia, San Diego, and Boulder for further analysis.

Every 5 days, we launch a large balloon to an altitude of about 35km to obtain a spatially resolved profile of the ozone layer.  These measurements nicely complement the integrated column thickness measurements done using the Dobson from the ground.

All that is the normal, day to day stuff.  We're also on hand to repair anything that goes abnormally.  We're prepared to reconstruct data cables, reload the operating system on the computers, rebuild the plumbing connecting the gas cylinders, and hopefully save an experiment with a minimum of down time for any other issue.

In trivial news, a famous person came by the station today.  I had a brief opportunity to speak with him, but it was made very clear that he was not interested in a bunch of dirty nerds clamoring for photographic evidence of such a meeting.  The rumor is that video footage may appear on the BBC sometime in the next several months.

By the way, it should go without saying that this blog is completely my creation in my role as a private citizen.  It in no way is, or claims to be, a reflection of the opinions or views of any agency or department of the US government, the National Science Foundation, the US Antarctic Program, or the local Dairy Council.  All views and opinions stated herein are purely my own.  I hope that satisfies all the lawyers out there.