the waiting game. part 1: Mission, Eventually.

Since Sat 19 Jan, we have been primary mission, backup, and backup for the backup for the Twin Otters. Backup for the backup? When the weather (or other events) prevents the primary mission, they go to the backup mission. Sometimes even that won't work so rather than scrap the whole day, they try for a 3rd mission.

Unfortunately for us, when the weather was beautiful (I was out at LDB in my tank top and snow pants and definitely not complaining! :), we were on secondary backup. We were told we'd be primary towards the end of this week (23-25 Jan). Thursday, so far our only day as primary mission, we were canceled due to a low which moved in Wed, bringing both cold (low teens & twenties) and cloudy conditions with fairly high winds (15-25mph, with gusts up to 30 & 40mph). With the instrument so near the Ice edge, it experiences quite coastal weather, so the low sucks in warmer air across the ocean, bringing moisture over the Ice, where it's apt to condense out as snow or fog. I actually saw fog here early Sat morning.

Word came down earlier today that we'd be on primary again for Sat/Sun, but as of Fri night, we're secondary backup for Sat, and somehow I doubt we'll get anything better for Sunday. What are they doing instead of helping us? Pulling in field camps scattered around the area, assisting in the Bassler recovery (the bigger plane all us balloonatics had hoped to use for our recoveries before it crashed just after New Year's... oops!), and taking more scientists out into the field.

People like Shelly, my roommate, who's helping maintain and upgrade U Wisconsin's automatic weather stations, which provide most of the long-term, wide-area weather information down here. She's adding snow-depth sonars to several of the stations to attempt to gauge snowfall; frequent strong winds make this trickier than it seems. She spent ~36 hours at Pole last week; they'd been schedule for 4 days but were delayed with weather and other people's flights.


The worse the weather in any given week, the further behind schedule everything gets, so that the absolute delay is probably something over a week now. Delays are common down here, but the weather has been particularly bad this year: a fairly large snow storm every few weeks, and lots of gray skies. ...almost feels like Ohio! Luckily, highly variable weather conditions mean the skies will clear eventually, and usually after a day or two wrapped in fuzz, enough sky clears to see the sunlight dramatic on the Royal Society Mountains, giving hope realized in a few more days of sun on Mactown itself.

So perhaps sometime next week we'll get started. In the meantime, ATIC and BESS wait for us to finish before they even begin, and Jan draws to a close. Luckily, I have been moderately successful at keeping myself entertained. Look for more on that in Part 2. of the waiting game saga.