A bright start of 2024
Happy New Year from AWIPEV!
Whereas it is still dark around the clock, the sun is on its way back up to us in the North. Until then we enjoy the cosiness and quietness of the night and any other light sources that nature and humankind brought us.
To make sure we are starting the year brightly, the AWIPEV laser got some new flash lamps – these lamps are essential for creating the famous laser beam characterizing the winter skyline of Ny-Ålesund. It is a precise and tedious job to exchanges those lamps and involves a bunch of tests afterwards. Yet the gentle touch and magic hands of Mathilde and Wilfried managed to do this smoothly, making the laser fit for again another 3 months(ish). It is important for measuring any potential polar stratospheric clouds that can form in the cold winter (and cause ozone to degrade in those higher altitudes), but also for the long-term aerosol measurements that are ongoing.
Despite the Lidar being able to measure all year round, it is still rather restricted due to weather conditions (clear sky is needed) and sometimes air traffic. A more stable factor is the AWIPEV weather balloon. Each day, the data measured by the radiosonde attached to the balloon are sent to the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and the data are manually fed into the GRUAN database, a database for high-quality climate data records. In wintertime, the radiosonde it is accompanied twice a week by a device that measures ozone, compared to only once a week in the summer. But at any day around 11 UTC, at any weather, Christmas or New Year, a balloon will be released. Amidst the changing climate and environment and amidst the flux of people coming and going, ballooning feels like one of the few stable factors in the transient Ny-Ålesund since 1993. Or to say it in a less melodramatic manner: “A balloon a day, keeps the bad mood away!”
