First Helo Visit - White Island

Today was our first field visit to an AWS site by helicopter. However, it was not our first helo flight. Today was our fourth attempt to visit White Island AWS. On Saturday we were scheduled to go but the pilot looked at White Island, saw that it was encased in clouds, and scrubbed the flight. We were scheduled to fly again on Monday but helo operations for the entire day were cancelled due to bad weather in McMurdo. On Tuesday, we were finally able to get in a helicopter and headed to White Island. As we got close to White Island, we were able to see that the top of the island, where the AWS is located, was covered in clouds. We turned around and flew back to McMurdo without landing at the site. There was another weather delay this morning. When the helo operations resumed they called and asked us to go on a flight to Black Island, where they were transporting a utility worker, and then we'd go onto White Island. We ended up leaving almost exactly at our originally scheduled departure time. Schedules and delays like this are fairly common for field work in Antarctica. You are always dependent on the ever changing weather and when you are provided an opportunity to go, you take it.

Helicopter landing at the top of White Island. The helicopter shut down and waited for us to complete our work.

Dave standing next to White Island AWS and waiting a few minutes to warm up before doing more work on the AWS.

Black Island and White Island are two islands immediately to the south of Ross Island, all of which are on the northwest corner of the Ross Ice Shelf. Black Island is a communications base for McMurdo and oftentimes has a few people running the operations. White Island is a little more removed from the USAP operations. The weather station on top of the island is also used as a repeater to communicate observations from nearby weather stations back to McMurdo. It took until my second season in Antarctica to realize that White Island is predominantly white and Black Island is predominantly black.

The surface of Black Island (top) is predominantly black. The surface of White Island (bottom) is mostly white, especially when viewed from a distance.

Clearly, the weather has been fairly intense here the last few days. The temperatures have generally been in the -5F to -10F range with strong easterly winds. There was some falling and blowing snow last night that obstructed the visibility down to about 1/4 mile. There was some question as to what we'd experience when we arrived at White Island. The AWS was reporting moderate winds at about 5-10 mph but the report when we landed at Black Island was that their winds were about 45 mph. Initially, when we landed at White Island, the winds were reasonable at around 10 mph and the temp was -12F. Within 20 minutes the winds were up to 25-30 mph and it was very cold. I recorded one gust to 35 mph with my handheld weather station. By the time we left, about 45 minutes later, the temperature dropped to -16F. That visit made it easily the coldest temperatures I have ever experienced when serving or installing an AWS. I wouldn't be surprised if I experience colder than that later on this field season, especially in West Antarctica.

Dave and I also presented at the weekly science lecture held in the Crary Lab library this evening. Our presentation was titled: "Telling Antarctic Meteorology Stories - From Observations to Modeling". Dave covered some of the history of the AWS program as well as some of the recent climatology work that they have been doing. I transitioned the presentation into sharing some about atmospheric computer models and a modeling study that we've been working on at CU involving changes in the atmospheric circulation in the Amundsen Sea region. The presentation seemed to go well. Talking about Antarctic meteorology is sort of a fun thing for me.

Giving the Wednesday Science Lecture: "Telling Antarctic Meteorology Stories from Observations to Modeling".

We are on back-up (we fly if the other scheduled flights can't because of weather) to fly back to Cape Hallett tomorrow. I am not expecting us to make the flight (we've been on back-up most every day this past week). There have been rumors of a big storm for McMurdo on Friday. I am a little hesitant on forecasts for Antarctica that are made more than a couple days ahead of time. We'll see.... the weather until then looks good.