Hotel Igloo Village Kangerlussuaq

There isn't a whole lot to report. I mostly just want to post some pictures from earlier today. As is clear from the pictures, it is quite cloudy, so lidar operation is presently at a stand still. Weather reports are suggesting skies will clear tomorrow night. In the mean time, I have seen quite a few Red Dwarf episodes on DVD. I can't say that I find it terribly amusing at this point, but there is a certain bond I have with the ...

... Greenland. Didn't you pass your destination by 4 hours by flying through Copenhagen?" You would be right. It turns out only Scandinavians want to go to Greenland at this time of year. I can prove it too. In Copenhagen (and Washington, DC), everyone would immediately speak english to me. No question where I was from. As soon as I boarded the airplane for Greenland, I ...

... morning bike rides and the skies were overcast, making it pointless to start the lidar system, I took a bit of a hike in the hills surrounding Kellyville. Every time I go outside I think the same thing. Greenland feels like a dream. It's a place that I scarcely believed exists still on Earth. There is no one here. There are no worn paths. The road to Kellyville from Kangerlussuaq is the longest in Greenland, so when I look out at the horizon, it is not ...

... getting everything in order here. True to my nature, I have been alternating between successful and unsuccessful weeks. The good news is that this is shaping up to be a very good week indeed. Last week, I stood somewhat parallelized, unsure of how to approach the issue of lidar receiver compensation. To reiterate, I have to measure the effects of the system on polarization, befor I can put together a design to cancel those effects. My advisor ...

... in the Kellyville fridge and they are pretty expensive in town. There are a few types of meals I have. The first type of meal is my standard breakfast/lunch meal. It consists of a random Danish deli meat on bread with Danish cheese. When I first got here, I ate these open sandwiches after all ingredients were accounted for on the plate. After a week of that, I found a way to spice it up. I microwave it for 30 seconds to melt the ...

... scattered in a three dimensional space, each component somewhere random between 0 and 1, where they should look something like the equator of a tipped planet. I was well aware the cause was power fluctuations in the laser, which varied rapidly from pulse to pulse, but also slowly drifted in time, but my attempts to do anything about it proved futile. The lidar hasn't been much better. Starting Sunday night, the clouds came in, preventing me from taking ...

... while connecting in Chicago. After their scheduled flight was canceled, only one of them could make it on the last flight to Albany that night, and thus on the 109th flight the next morning at 5AM to Kangerlussauq (there is generally only one flight per week). It was already decided that Katie had to make it, because she will be running the lidar system for a 8 weeks later this summer and she needs to be familiar with it. So Katie ended up with the last seat to Albany ...

... Greenland, sometime called the ice cap. You can see it from our site here, it is just a big white something behind the hills and mountains, nearly blending in with the sky. Seven of us went on the trip. Heinrich, the on site mechanic for our research facility, Oola, who is a site radar tech, Christian, a staff engineer for the site, Martin, a visiting engineer from Norway, Jan, Jeff and I. It is worth noting that the above listed staff are from Denmark and ...

... the lasers externally. Suddenly, after moving them, one of the lasers was only outputting a tenth of its previous power. We spent all day trying to figure out the issue. If the issue was internal to the laser we could not open the system without voiding the warranty and would have to ship it back to the states. This would have potentially pushed our schedule back more than 6 months. Meanwhile, inspection of the transmitter ...

... you do for your research? My advisor is a professor in the aerospace engineering department at CU. His research is focused around atmospheric sciences. One way of obtaining information about the atmosphere is through optical systems called lidar. I am a PhD student at CU in the electrical engineering department with a focus in optics. I work on the lidar systems and the optical phenomena they attempt to capture in our atmosphere. How does lidar work? Lidar is just like radar ...