Snow delay followed by two flights on Friday

Again, sorry for the lack of postings. The weather delay turned into a snow storm that lasted until after midnight. The good news is that I was able to collect some more snow samples for UH Professor Jim Lawrence. Bad news is that we were stuck in McMurdo and not flying around collecting data. Everyone was snowbound and trying to use the internet at the same time, so I couldn't get any photos on the blog. I took the break in flights to finish up the Final Exam for my Introduction to Climate Change. Exam is next Monday, I wish my students well. I tried to make it fair and not too hard. I have been testing questions out on the graduate students here in Antarctica, and they all think the test is too easy, this is a good sign as my Intro class is aimed at freshmen and sophomores. This morning we finally made it back to Willy Field, and it took over 45 minutes in the Delta to get there. As the road is all drifted in with soft snow, the Delta is the only passenger vehicle that can make it. It is a long bumpy 45 minutes, so you don't want to forget to bring something important because it will take you at least 2 hours to get back to the airfield. When we got there we found the buildings and aircraft were surrounded by snow drifts. After a couple of hours of shoveling and digging out, we got everything back to normal and started up the instruments for a 1.5 hour OH test flight. Looks like the NCAR guys have figured out the problem and now are working on a solution. That is good news. Three hours later we did another short (3 hour) science flight sampling the gases coming out from the Mt. Erebus volcano. Bad news for me is that one of my computers did not start properly, so I didn't get any data. This happens sometimes, and no one to blame other than myself. I have to do a better job of training the guys that are on the flight to recognize and fix any problems with my instruments.