September in Ny-Ålesund
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The summer has come to an end and the winter is slowly approaching. At night, the temperatures are falling below 0°C for most of the times and during the day it is only a few degrees above zero. Ice is forming on the creeks and lakes and the first snow has covered the mountains like icing sugar. Snow and rain are alternating. While in the summer there had hardly been any rain, it doesn’t stop now.
In the evening the sun has started to hide below the horizon again and it is getting darker and darker daily. It is amazing to observe how the days are getting shorter and the nights longer every day! It won’t take too long until the sun will not rise above the horizon anymore. In the middle of October the polar night will begin.
With the sun disappearing of behind the horizon we now get beautiful sunsets again. And last week I got almost startled by the moon suddenly appearing on the evening sky. The moon, that we hadn’t seen all summer.
It is getting quiet at the AWIPEV Base. Only a small amounts of projects are at the station now. Last week the permafrost group was visiting, bringing the Bayelva field site back in shape. Then, we have two new instruments from the University of Bern in Switzerland on the roof of the observatory. They are measuring water and ozone in the stratosphere and mesosphere. There was almost some serious action going on at the observatory when the instruments got lifted up onto the roof by a crane.
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