Notes from the Field

For SPURS-2 we are installing three moorings that will stay in place for over a year. Our moorings are arrays of instruments dangling from a surface floatation and anchored at the bottom. The moorings eventually will be recovered by R/V Thompson in September or October 2017. They will be recovered by using a release mechanism […]

To accomplish the science goals of ATom, every scientific instrument on the NASA DC-8 is tenderly cared for. In the case of the Single Particle Soot Photometer (SP2) an instrument for quantifying black carbon aerosol concentration, this care includes gentle heating after cold nights, frequent laser intensity calibrations, and renewal of drying agents used to […]

By Eric Lindstrom One of the popular topics of conversation during the first week of the voyage has been sleep. Whether it is poor sleep, good sleep, disturbed sleep, or deep sleep, almost everyone in the science party has had something to say about the subject of sleep. Sleep on a ship is special. As […]

Hi there, Last blog post of for this field season, as Olivia mentioned in her science post, we were able to collect an important amount of high-quality data to further our knowledge of firn aquifers and try to answer the following research questions: How fast is the water flowing in the firn aquifers? How permeable […]

By Eric Lindstrom As I mentioned in a previous blog post, the R/V Revelle is bristling with meteorological sensors. Some are permanently installed aboard, some are just for SPURS-2, and some are on the moorings we will deploy. Raymond Graham, a graduate student at University of Connecticut, did a quick count of meteorological sensors and […]

As the DC-8 flies around the world for the ATom project, we are crossing many time zones and occasionally loosing and gaining days! For most of the first half of the project, I didn’t really notice these time changes. I gained the most time leaving Boston for California and had one to two hourly stretches […]

By Eric Lindstrom One of the most common questions I get (and the first comment to this blog) is “How do you measure ocean salinity from space?” During the SPURS-1 campaign in 2012 I wrote a blog post on this topic. Basically the story is one of building a very sensitive instrument (a radiometer) to […]

By Eric Lindstrom Fieldwork in physical oceanography, like many sciences, requires enormous preparation followed by a shorter very intensive period of action. SPURS-2 is no exception. The work over the next six weeks has been in the planning and staging for several years. Now, all the gear and scientists have reached the ship and we […]

This year we teamed up with the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab (CRREL) (thank you Dave Finnegan and Adam Lewinter for the collaboration to produce repeat LiDAR surveys of our Rio Behar catchment primary study areas). LiDAR stands for Light Detection and Ranging (or, depending on where you are in the world, Laser RADAR), […]