Let the 2023-24 AWS field season commence! This season, we will have two field team members for a couple months: myself (Dave Mikolajczyk) and Wenhua Wu, who works in the accounting department at SSEC. This is Wenhua’s first time deploying to Antarctica! As I write this, our field season has just started, as we got to McMurdo a couple days ago on 7 Nov. We left the US on 1 Nov and spent four days in Christchurch before heading to the ice. Our ice flight was originally scheduled for 6 Nov, but the plane had mechanical issues so we were delayed a day.
This season, our work will be entirely based out of McMurdo. We have ~ten sites in the McMurdo area and ~nine sites on the Ross Ice Shelf we want to visit. But as always, our initial site visit wishlist is ambitious, so we’ll see how many we can actually get to! But better to plan for more than fewer.
We enjoyed our time in Christchurch (of course!). We had some sunny days as well as some rainy ones, but we were happy the temperatures remained above freezing. Here are a few pictures.. and look at all that greenery!
On 7 Nov, we flew down to McMurdo on the C-17. After about five hours, we landed on the ice!
We’ve started scheduling our trainings and meetings to get the field season started. And we’ve had some time to marvel at the interesting clouds that come with this region, including some lenticular clouds around Mt. Discovery.
More updates to come, with perhaps our first site visits next week!
Cheers,
Dave