Krissie's Blog - 6

Apr 30, 08:44 AM

So I told you last week that I would show you plastic balloons. I use 3kg plastic balloons every three days. They are quite a bit larger than my 600g latex balloons, and the filling procedure is also quite different. What you are seeing is the fill tube sitting on the floor. It looks like one of those flappy wavy guys you see on the side of the road. I have put a clamp in the middle of the balloon, so only the top half will be filled up with helium for now. I’m holding onto a cardboard ring, shaking the balloon regularly to get it unstuck from itself. Once the ring floats, I can let go and prepare the radiosonde the same way I would for a rubber balloon.

There is still a fill weight that gets pulled off the table when the balloon is full. I clamp the balloon to the table, cut part of the fill tube off and tie a knot in it, and attach the payout reel and radiosonde.

I wanted to show you how large the balloon gets. My lovely assistant/boyfriend is a tall guy, and it’s taller than he is. It’s also not too much lower than the ceiling. The next step is to open the doors and unclamp the balloon. This releases it from the table and allows for expansion into the lower half of the balloon as it ascends. I always prefer to have an assistant when launching plastics, because any wind at all makes the balloon quite unruly.

When we do a dual-launch with NOAA, who sometimes uses two 7kg balloons, it requires three people. Inside, they are already so buoyant that it takes two hands to hold them.

Then as soon as the wind catches them, they are quite a handful. We let go of the balloons at the same time, and then the person holding the sondes runs until the balloons lift them out of his hands. It can be quite a far distance on a windy day. Days with two plastic balloons always draw photographers. You can see one lying down at the door, one on the left side of the picture, one is taking the picture, and the NOAA guy next to me is holding a camera in one hand and the balloon in the other.

I’ve told you all about balloons, but that only comprises about 2 hours of my work day. Safety Laurie came up on the roof with me and took a picture of me observing. (She’s also holding one of the plastic balloons inside the BIF.) So that’s what I do. I go on the roof and see how much cloud cover I can see. It’s quite tricky trying to see clouds at night. At night I’m not allowed to use that ladder on the right side of the picture. It leads to the roof’s upper deck, which houses several light-sensitive research cameras and experiments that observe the night sky. They must have zero light pollution and an unobstructed view of the entire celestial dome. They would be able to tell if I went up there, even for a quick peek. From this picture, I can see west, south, and east. Then I climb back down, go back inside, and walk to the observation deck so I can see south, west, and north. That’s also where I now shine my flashlight to pick out precipitation. What you see in the picture is Safety’s breath and some ice crystals.

In the summer there are 4 weather observers. The first flight of the day comes in around 8:30 AM, but we have to take hourly observations 6 hours before each flight and two hours after. Sometimes we have flights until 2AM. So there are only one or two hours a day that we can do just a local observation, which does not require any sky conditions, surface conditions, or precipitation. Every 6 hours we do a really detailed observation called a synoptic, which is what I’m doing in the black & white picture. This is the same for both the summer and the winter. In the winter, since there are no flights, we do local observations for the 5 hours in between the synoptics. So in the winter, there are only two observers, but we are responsible for 24 hours of weather and never get a day off. Here’s the summer staff and our big boss, who bounces between headquarters in Denver and field camps on the continent. We’re on the observation deck, which overlooks the skiway (runway). This is where I do the second half of my observation. Yeah, 20 below isn’t very cold, but notice all of our hands are in our pockets. I mentioned before that hands get cold VERY fast. I think this was around 8 or 9 PM.

I don’t know if I made this clear: there is only one day here all year — one long sunrise, one long day, one long sunset, and one long night. Because we are in such a unique location, we do a lot of science to take advantage of this. For example, the aurora research is why I can’t go on the upper part of the roof at night. We have auroras probably on a daily basis. At least, I see them pretty much every day at noon. But in the summer the sun is up 24 hours a day, so we measure the amount of solar radiation by using the Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorder, or sun globes.
This is how the sun globes work.

This is a pair of fresh, unburned sun cards.

These are the sun globes on the roof of the Station (where I’m not allowed to go anymore). The ball on the right faces “north.” The ball on the left faces “south.” The things kind of shielding the globes hold the sun cards.

You can see me taking the picture, but you can also see the sun burning into the card on the right side of the globe.

In early summer, the sun wasn’t quite so strong, so it only burned portions of the card. Around December the sun is higher and stronger and burns right through the cards, so we sometimes have to tape them together. When the card looked like this in mid-summer, the clouds were so thick that no sun shone through during those times. The space between two lines is one hour. Each card measures 12 hours. We have a special plastic card with lines on it that lets us break down the hour into tenths. At the end of each day, we enter each hour’s sunshine into a database. We change the cards at midnight Zulu every day. The globes are taken off the roof in late March, because the sun becomes too weak and low to burn the paper, and we don’t want the globes to crack from the cold. They are put up again in September. Every January the National Climatic Data Center receives all of these cards. Down here, the sun is visible in all directions: SW in the “morning” and NE at “night.” Here and way up north, are the only places that use two sun globes. If a place in the mid-latitudes uses them at all, they use one globe.

So that’s my last “Bring-the-World-to-Work Day” for a while. Next week we’ll talk about either the Station or how we entertain ourselves. But here’s my favorite picture I’ve seen so far. This photo was taken by Patrick Cullis, the NOAA guy who is always holding the sondes in the pictures I use. Because of the light-sensitive projects around the place, all windows must have cardboard in them to block light. This was a long exposure, so you can see some of the light from Comms and the red lights from our main entrance, Destination Zulu. The light that looks like the sun is from the Vehicle Maintenance Facility. The little red light on the right marks some exhaust pipe coming out of the snow. You can see the giant columns below the station, giving it its name of The Elevated Station. The observation deck is on the right side of the picture. That top door is the one I was holding open in my first blog entry. The door below that is called Destination Alpha, the entrance closest to the skiway. That hill on the left, “north” of the Station, is where the Ceremonial South Pole is. That’s where my bio picture for the blog was taken, as well as the panorama in my first entry. Then up above you can see green auroras and the Milky Way behind it. Fantastic, Cully!

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