Temperatures have plunged to around -23C for the past week or so and we have had a few beautiful and clear nights. These photos were taken this morning with the lidar running (the famous green beam) and a brilliant auroral display completing the scene (one photo being partly polluted by sodium light - note Venus prominently on the lower left hand side of the photo). I also managed to take a nice shot of Scorpio with one of my favourite stars, Antares, shining bright and red.

The sea ice has thickened enough for us to venture out and last week we mapped ice thickness along the boundary between new and older ice. It was a slightly nippy (-21C) but sunny day and the icebergs were breathtakingly beautiful with an endless variety of blue shades from light shining through snow and ice layers of different thickness. Wow. I feel I am constantly repeating myself but Antarctica is a truly amazing place, if you persevere you will be rewarded. It is no different from life in general though - this, like any other precious thing, has to be earned.

I have been learning about the dynamics of the Antarctic polar vortex which in its greatness, of course, puts the Arctic vortex to an utter shame. Nitric acid and water vapour mixing ratios are required to initialise the microphysical model runs and I expect that in our data we will see the effects of the gradual denitrification within the vortex as the winter progresses. Davis is located at the vortex edge so things can get quite dynamic. I am looking forward to finding out what the basic statistics produces in terms of cloud base altitude and cloud type as a function of time (day number) for each year (starting from 2001). Then there is the most exciting part - how well/badly can the model reproduce our observations? So many things to take into account...presence of planetary and gravity wave activity along the trajectories, local sonde data for temperature sanity checking against the model, selection of the meteorological dataset to be used for trajectories (HYSPLIT and GSFC for now), chemistry (UARS and Aura MLS)... Every time I think I have the basic set of thoughts sorted out something new pops up and I feel hopelessly ignorant. And nervous!

I have started reading "normal" books (= fiction other than science fiction) again, something I haven't done for years with the excuse of never having enough time (pathetic really - there's always time). I went looking for Hemingway in the library and was dismayed to discover only one - instead I ended up with F.Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the night" which I consider to be a very decent start. I also grabbed Kundera's "The unbearable lightness of being" in French - a sure way to get a headache!