It has been a very busy January so far! After a quick overnight trip to one of the field huts to welcome the new year in the Vestfold Hills the weather has been absolutely stunning and blessed us with clear skies which has allowed us to break a record in the lidar observing hours - for the second time this summer! So far we have 190 hours of data this month and numerous events of probable Polar Mesospheric Clouds (PMC) coinciding with Polar Mesospheric Summer Echoes (PMSE) from the radar. We have also installed a second telescope to the system in preparation for the Polar Stratospheric Cloud (PSC) season to improve the collection of high resolution temperature and cloud data. Next summer we are hoping to add an auxiliary polarisation system to the lidar configuration for further PSC work.

Apart from helping out with the PMC observations I have continued the photometer measurements three times a day and we should end up having a reasonable dataset for the first summer of our photometer observations at Davis if the weather holds. Right now I am also concentrating on the task of enabling our lidar IDL system (currently running on Windows platform) to work on linux which is my preferred OS (well, since Solaris for Intel does not run too well on my laptop). All lidar data is analysed with a library of IDL routines which interface to various models such as MSISE and CIRA. Most problems are solved by adding operating system dependent case statements to the offending code but it doesn't appear to be so straightforward to get the MSISE Fortran code to run properly under linux. Those programming skills being rather rusty combined with various small but nasty issues (such as directly calling a subroutine from a shared object library so wrappers are needed) has stalled the progress somewhat but in the process of googling away I came across an object oriented language called Ruby for which by coincidence an MSISE wrapper has already been written. Well, either I'll learn some Fortran, refresh my UNIX sys programming skills and go the brute force way or try the Ruby trickery - I know how to make the brute force method end result to talk back to IDL but not so sure about the Ruby method. This is good (or maybe not - ask again next month when the thing still crashes) - the only way to learn of course is to have a go at it and fall flat on one's face a few times. The fact that I am new to IDL doesn't help but whilst it seems a bit cranky as far as programmning languages are concerned I am very impressed by all the things it can do.

In between the lidar obs and bouts of IDL/Fortran frustrations I did get out for a day to assist in a geochemical soil sampling on one of the islands here. That was an absolutely fantastic day - there is an active adelie penguin colony on the island and consequently never a dull moment - I just adore those darlings (as probably is evident by now!). Half of the island population consisted of chicks of various ages and the parents seemed to be at times driven to sheer madness by the chicks chasing them around the colony begging for food. Skuas added a dynamic component to the experience and they are certainly not too shy to come and swoop at anyone walking in their territory. We also saw a leopard seal which is the first time for me - it is an impressive animal, bigger than I thought and scarier than I thought - I would certainly not want to be in the water when they are around. We witnessed one of those inevitable scenes of the leopard seal catching an adelie - whilst it is part of the natural cycle of life here I still don't think I want to see it again.

The photo of the day is from the trip - I'll add a few more shortly - this is the view from the top of the island (note the penguins hitching a ride on the ice floe in the lower left quadrant of the photo).