Sciencey stuff

99% of the science here happens in the summer when the weather is better. We do have 1 scientist person here now.  Here are a bunch of pics of the equipment he's using. He's using LIDAR to measure temperatures of the atmosphere, or some such thing.  LIDAR is like radar but uses laser light instead of radio waves.  I also found the descriptions of what they're doing on the internal science intranet page, so here ya go...


Two lidar beams shooting to the sky from Arrival Heights. The photo was taken by Zhibin Yu -- the first winter-over scientist of A-130-M LIDAR project -- on May 2nd, 2011. This Fe Boltzmann temperature lidar developed by Dr. Xinzhao Chu and her colleagues is used to make year-round and full-diurnal measurements of polar middle and upper atmosphere for the studies of atmosphere temperature, composition, chemistry and dynamics at McMurdo, Antarctica.

University of Colorado Boulder
CIRES
Boulder, Colorado

Supporting Stations:  McMurdo Station
Research Locations:  Mcmurdo Station

Project Description:
This research project’s objectives are to: 1. Characterize the thermal structure and establish a temperature record throughout the polar atmosphere at 78° south latitude to monitor climate change and validate atmospheric models used to project future climate; 2. Characterize polar mesospheric clouds (PMC) and mesospheric iron layers through the entire summer season to characterize the PMC morphology, heterogeneous chemistry, and dynamic processes in the summer mesosphere and lower thermosphere; 3. Characterize mesospheric iron layers through year-round measurements and compare with a gas-phase mesospheric chemistry model to provide a test of the large-scale dynamics in the middle and upper atmosphere; 4. Characterize gravity-wave potential energy by analyzing temperature and atmospheric density perturbations, and compare to gravity-wave models to study gravity-wave source, propagation, dissipation, and impact; and 5. Fill a gap in the latitudinal coverage of Antarctic ground-based measurements, define the latitudinal temperature and PMC trend, and quantify inter-hemispheric differences in Mesosphere and Lower Thermosphere climate.

Field Season Overview:
This is the second season for the Fe Boltzmann LIDAR campaign at Arrival Heights, McMurdo Station. The LIDAR was successfully installed in the first summer season of 2010-2011, with much data collected starting mid-December 2010 and into the winter operation. Therefore, this second field season will be focused on the continued collection of as much LIDAR data as possible, training the second winter-over scientist, and maintaining the system to acheive optimum performance. Besides the winter-over researcher, this project will deploy four people during the 2011-2012 season. This number will be reduced to one winter-over scientist in winter starting mid-February 2012. The summer research team members will deploy to McMurdo Station by mid-October. After getting the LIDAR optimized and helping the new winter-over scientist to settle in, the Principal Investigator (PI) will leave by early November. The other three team members will remain at McMurdo Station for extensive summer observations. The PI will then deploy again in late January until mid-February to help finalize the winter plan and continue the winter-over training program. The project's scientific goals require LIDAR operation covering both day and night through an entire year.

 Our scientist doing, something sciencey...