Last night was a banner night for us. After working for two days, CAPABL was wheeled outside and turned on for the first time here in Greenland. What is CAPABL you ask? Well, CAPABL stands for Cloud, Aerosol Polarization And Backscatter Lidar. This is the project that I am working on during this trip.
Saturday I worked mostly by myself putting CAPABL back together while Ryan was working on another system here at SRI (Sondrestrom Research Institute). Who is Ryan? I'm glad you asked. Ryan Neely is a PhD candidate that I am working with. He is gathering his thesis data with CAPABL. I have one thing to say about him, he doesn't sleep all that often, but when he sleeps, it's for 10-12 hours.
We got most of the work done on rebuilding CAPABL on Saturday, but we had the last bit of rough calibration to do on Sunday. We rolled it out of the building the first time around 9:30 pm, but it was still to light outside to do much work. We tried again at 11:30 and it was finally starting to darken enough so that we could see the laser beam. It was exciting to see that the rough calibration was good enough to start seeing some data coming in. The big question now is: how long will it take us to dial it in to get the high altitude data we want? Only time will tell.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment