Last Flights

We had two really good flights the past two days. On Tuesday, Otter flew back and forth across the Reeves glacier and we mapped out the NO at multiple altitudes at both the top and at the mouth of the glacier. This should give us a good start at calculating a budget for NO outflow on this day. In addition, all the instruments were working well and we should have another good day of photochemical measurements (NO, NO2, OH, SO2, H2SO4, O3, jNO2, jO(1D), etc). Fred and Doug flew back North on Wednesday, and they hosted an ANTCI Project party. Thanks Doug and Fred for paying for all the refreshments. I wish I could have made it to the party, but I was out at the Otter doing my calibrations and then the 9:15 Shuttle driver forgot to pick us up at Willy field, so everyone was in bed by the time I got back to town at 11:15. This was Doug's last trip to Antarctica as he is going to retire. I know, he has said this before, but think this really is going to be his last project. So Ed got a poster of Antartica printed out at NCAR and well all signed it as a going away present. Today's flight was up to the plateau to get some more sampling of the "OH canopy" that surrounds the Antarctic plateau in the boundary layer. We could use some more data of this, and sounds like we go some. On the way home they stopped to sample some more glacial outflow. Even though the winds were weak, we still saw some modest amount of NO, so sounds like we can not ignore these types of days either. Interestingly, the weather forecast was for bad weather on the plateau, but pilots (Chuck and John) said is was beautiful. Chuck took a bunch of photos with my camera, but I forgot to get it back from him, so I will have more photos later. Other exciting news is that we all thought that we were not going to get back to New Zealand until the 18th or the 21st of Dec. But word we got today was that the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) has fixed the broken C-130 and we might get headed home on the morning of the 16th. We are not sure about this, but we don't want to miss our flight home, so after plane came back at 6:00 PM today we started taking everything off. By the time we left on the 10:15 shuttle we had about 1/2 of the instruments pack up. We still have a lot to do since we have to get instruments over the hill back to McMurdo and to the science cargo office. Hopefully we will have a few seconds to spare tomorrow to get this done. I better get back to my packing. I'll try to post more photos tomorrow. If you don't hear from me I was too busy and will try to post again from NZ. Take care. Barry