Hotel Kangerlussuaq

... They are all alone in the middle of space, confined to a ship. I am isolated in the arctic, confined to a building. I just have fewer ludicrious adventures. I took a hike today out into the surrounding hills on my snowshoes. It was cold, but for the most part, I was well prepared. My fingers just got cold every time I tried to use the camera. Fortunately the batteries died pretty quickly, so I was quite comfortable for most of the hike.

... to start explaining that I don't speak danish. I guess I look like an American (big surprise). But once you get on an airplane to Greenland, the desination trumps what you look like. "He certainly dresses like an American," they say, "but he's going to Greenland. Perhaps he was homeschooled in Spalbard." Last night I got the system up and running and verified ...

... other signs of civilization. There are not roads hidden in the valleys or houses on the next hillside. I can venture in any direction without concern for trespassing or breaking rules. I need only be concerned with being able to get back. When I returned from my hike, the sky began to clear, so I got the lidar running and set it on autopilot while I pack. While packing my belongings is relatively simple, I also have to go through all the optics we ...

... I had discussed it several times in the months running up to this trip, but I found the agreed approach unsettling. The proposed method was to characterize the receiver by shining a well polarized laser down it. Thus, where the primary mirror of the receiver is about 3 ft in diameter, I would sample only a portion the size of the laser beam (approximately 1.5 mm in diameter). This, I was certain, would give me an incomplete picture of how ...

... These sandwiches are the staple in my diet. You might call them the "go-to" meal whenever I can't think of what to eat. Breakfast has progressively shifted from the above sandwiches to toast. There is a simple reason for this. I really like the jam they have here. I can't really think of any other excuse to eat it than toast, so this has become another common snack. I eat this probably more than half the time for breakfast. The ...

... data above a couple km (useless). The following day it rained, then snowed. On Tuesday it was still cloudy but I saw a few clearings, so I decided to run the lidar. Instead of getting a sensible Rayleigh return where the signal peaks when it enters the telescope field of view then drops off roughly as 1/z^2 (where z is altitude), some sort of strange double bump had infiltrated the data which I attributed to a chopper window opening too slowly. This ...

... and Steve went back to Denver. Now all the visitors, with the exception of John, are leaving this morning on the 109th flight back to Albany. It will be much quieter very soon and most of my guidance will no longer be on site. The folks from SRI scheduled their visit to have a farewell dinner to Eggert, the current site manager. He has been here for 12 years and has accepted a job back in Iceland. So he and his family will be packing up and leaving next weekend. That ...

... here year round. They are paid by SRI (Stanford Research Institute) to operate and maintain the site. The transition from land to glacier is sudden. In many places, a wall of ice stands to impede forward progress. However, we eventually arrived at a place where we could walk down on the glacier and attempt to cross Greenland. We got as far as the first tall hill of ice before being forced to turn back. It seems that Martin did not pack enough cigarettes ...

... showed it was already cramped with optics and had little room to accept another laser, beam expander and steering mirror. Today, I correctly guessed that the frequency doubling crystal is only temperature regulated when one of the laser controllers is on (Laser 2). Thus to use Laser 1, the controller to Laser 2 must be on even if it is not in use. Without temperature control, the conversion to our green wavelength is inefficient ...

... only using higher frequency electromagnetic waves (light) instead of lower radio frequencies. In principle any light source can be used for lidar, but in any practical sense, lasers are the most appropriate sources due to their high energy densities and low beam divergence. We effectively shine a laser into the sky and collect the backscattered light from air and particles. Thus the lidar system has a transmitter (laser) to put light on the sky and receiver (generally a large ...