Notes from the Field

ATom-1, the first of four ATom deployments over the next few years, is about to wind down. We’ve covered over 60,000 km and flown all the way around the world, but unlike the Jules Verne classic, it took us only 24 days (and not 80) to make it back to Palmdale, California. I managed not […]

By Eric Lindstrom What do Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) and Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736-1813)  have to do with SPURS-2? How do we have two experiments going on simultaneously honoring the work of these famous mathematicians? Two frames of reference have taken their names from these 18th century mathematicians. In science, including oceanography, when we make measurements of […]

As the first phase of the ATom project draws to a close, I am still surprised at just how far the influence of land, and fires in particular, can travel through the atmosphere. Most of the time, the influence of land (and pollution that people generate) can only be seen a few miles from shore. […]

The ATom mission is the first to traverse the whole lengths of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans while making atmospheric measurements from the ocean surface to high altitudes. When we planned ATom, one idea was to compare pollution impacts between the oceans. I expected that human activities would have much greater influence in the Atlantic, […]

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 […]