It's already February - where did the time go! The weather seems to be getting more variable after a sensationally sunny and stable December-January and the air has definitely started to cool down with subzero temperatures at night starting to persist during the day. It is most noticeable when wandering outside doing something that a couple of weeks ago could be done without a hat or gloves on - it is also more pleasant to go running with one layer of thermals being just perfect.

The station is getting frantically busy with the final resupply approaching. Site maintenance work is gearing towards the final stages for getting the station ready for winter and the air operations (both fixed wing CASAs and the choppers) have been busy retrieving the Amery ice shelf science field parties back to the station. There are a lot of very happy and content scientists at the station right now with all programmes having achieved (or exceeded) their targets for the season. This weekend will also be pretty busy with several field parties coming and going on various short missions in the Vestfold Hills.

An added excitement at the station at the moment is the collection of male elephant seals residing on the beach - they are huge animals and their snorting and carrying on can be heard far away (if you think you have heard someone snoring try listening to these guys!) The other night we watched one of them haul itself up to the others where it promptly proceeded to stir a squabble and induced a spectrum of amazing guttural sounds - I wish I had had a sound recorder!

Vasiliy Golovnin (Voyage 4) arrived at the Mawson station on Thursday evening after stopping at Casey first and will remain there for at least a week before continuing on to Davis. Aurora Australis (V3) is doing the BROKE marine science cruise at the moment and will be collecting the summerers from Davis around 3 March but that stop will be just for a couple of days. After Aurora departs us winterers will not see anyone from the outside world until late November - that goes for any mail, fresh fruit and cold viruses which we have no immunity against too!

As far as my project is concerned I made some good progress with the MSISE model migration - I admit that IDL certainly outsmarted me and I got punished for not having read the manual properly. After getting the Ruby method to work I had another look at the IDL documentation and voila - there is a very smart option available in the IDL call_external function which automagically generates the appropriate wrapper for an external shared library - it took some time to get it working but I finally got my victory last week with the model now working flawlessly from within IDL. YesSSSS!! That was a very good experience as in the process I became closely familiar with the MSISE source code as well as some of our own lidar IDL library routines. My next task is to get the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) PSC microphysics model integrated into our environment as an automated step in the chain of standard PSC analysis - I am looking forward to doing all that as it not only requires new IDL routines but also some good tinkering on the linux side to reformat the trajectory model output files into a suitable format for the DMI model etc.

I also discovered an easier way to get my thesis into a respectable layout. There is no question at all about using LaTex - that's a natural must - however I had never heard of Lyx before last week when another PhD student here mentioned it to me - Lyx is a wonderful WYSIWYM (what You See Is What You Mean) editor which uses LaTex (including BibTex) and after fiddling around for about an hour I have to conclude that it is a truly fantastic tool for producing LaTex quality output with ease. Check it out at http://www.lyx.org

Yesterday I got out on the boats for a quick escape in the afternoon - a few of us were dropped off at Gardener Island and spent a couple of hours with the darlings there (hence the photos). There appears to be a rather bimodal distribution of chick sizes at the moment with one of the two chicks from the same parent being much smaller than the other. I assume this is the survival game with the chicks being of same age but one being fed more than the other. The parents are ever so stressed with their offspring continuously chasing them around the colony and it is not uncommon to see a parent scramble down the hill with two or more squawking chicks at its heel and then nosediving into the relative calm of the sea in an escape. It was a very nice afternoon and a perfect ending for a good week all around!