PASCAL meets ACLOUD

Wednesday afternoon the PASCAL crew visited us at the airport. After we explained our instruments to them, we took one large group pictures of the PASCAL and the ACLOUD team together.

Visit time

Yesterday Polarstern arrived in Longyearbyen. So many of us visited Polarstern in the morning and in the afternoon the Polarstern people visited our airplanes.
After meeting Polarstern many times from above, we were really happy to set foot on the ship. We had a look at the working conditions and all the instruments on board.
Also the Polarstern group was really interested in our aircraft and the installed instruments.
In the evening we all had together a nice dinner and party.

The ACLOUD campaign has still one week to go, whereas the PASCAL campaign ended yesterday.

9th encounter

But this time, they met Polarstern for real :)

Rush hour at LYR

Unexpected long queue at the airport check-in at 1 AM in the middle of the "night". That's because some commercial flights to Oslo leave at 2:30 AM. Four hours later, Polar 5 / 6 took of for another combined Polarstern - A-Train mission. This morning CloudSat and the other satellites of the A-Train constellation twice pass Polarstern in close distance, once at 8:00 and after one orbit a second time at about 9:30 local time. This chance will be used to combine all three types of remote sensing, ground-based, airborne (Polar 5), and space-borne with in situ measurements by Polar 6. Just don't look into one of the lidar laser beams

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No flight = time for waffles.

Today again the weather did not allow a flight. A occlusion does pass Svalbard... It is cloudy, quite dark and it rains... At the same time, these clouds are also in the area of Polarstern, where measurements would have been quite complicated. So we decided not to fly today and use the day for preparing the next days.














This free time also can be spent to make some waffles. In the hotel of our meeting room every afternoon a waffle iron is setup with all incredients needed for a good afternoon snack. Some of us like it sweet with jam, some heartly with norwegian cheese.

Leipziger high-quality work

Polar 5 and Polar 6 are airborne again. Finally, the weather improved, no fog today,... and we again meet Polarstern at roughly 82° N. Today, boundary layer profiles will be sampled at different latitudes between Polarstern and the northern tip of Svalbard. 

Therefore, both aircraft fly legs of roughly 8 min in different altitudes. Pictures from the take off preparation are posted here:

https://twitter.com/MarioMech1/status/874968830128336897

Meanwhile some of us are still left on ground and spend the time in the Spitzbergen Hotel, formerly  known as Funken-Hotel. This is one of the older buildings in town. Walls are labelled with old construction drawings of the mining sites. Many of them were obviously build by german ingeneurs. The lorry trail, actually, by a company from Leipzig... 

Fog - Forecast vs. Reality

After two days when we were grounded because fog was forcasted but not present directly over the airport, today forecasts look better and no fog was predicted by the latest TAF from yesterday.

As Murphy's law predicts, of course today the fog was acutally present and again allowed ny flight activities with Polar 5/6. We used the time to drive above the fog and take some sunny pictured on top of the Advendsdalen.

Other impressions of today's fog:
https://twitter.com/TDonth/status/874201426993479680
https://twitter.com/TDonth/status/874170905454407680

Later we followed the landing approach of a commercial aircraft on FlightRadar24. Even this aircraft equiped with automatic landing systems which allow to fly in non-visual conditions did need about three approaches until it finally landed safely.