End of the campaign
Last Saturday I packed the W-band Doppler radar (WProf), which has been measuring clouds and snowfall above Princess Elisabeth Antarctica base since early December. All the rest of the equipment was already dismounted in the previous days and stored in the base, so this moment assumes a symbolic significance for me: it is the end of a long, successful field campaign, and the beginning of the trip back home. WProf was very reliable, collecting an uninterrupted series of vertical profiles for over two months. The same cannot be said for all the other instruments, and during the campaign I had to deal with a variety of problems, ranging from the frequent stops in the LIDAR data acquisition, to the drops in the power of the X-band radar transmission. Nevertheless, all the equipment has been functioning for most of the season, and the whole dataset is unprecedented, in this region, for the variety, in type and location, of the measurements.
Alfonso Ferrone is a PhD student at EPFL. This field note relates to his field trip at Princess Elisabeth Station in Antarctica from December 2019 to February 2020 funded by a Polar Access Fund grant.
Header photograph: Alfonso Ferrone
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