Ari, Gary, Dr. Chu, Yingfei, and Shannen prepare to board the C-17 in Christchurch. We awoke before 5 AM on Friday, February 2nd in Christchurch, NZ to shuttle to the USAP Clothing Distribution Center. There, we collected our cold weather gear and prepared to board a US Air Force C-17 cargo plane to McMurdo. The flight was noisy, but legroom was ample, as was the in-flight meal. We stepped off the plane and onto the ice just past 4 PM. First glimpses of Antarctica out one of the two cargo bay windows on the C-17. After arriving at McMurdo Station, we attended a short orientation meeting, retri ..read more

The view out the window of the flight from Auckland to Christchurch. Pictured is Nelson Lakes National Park, on the northern end of the South Island. On Sunday, January 28th, five members of Dr. Chu’s lidar research team began the journey to McMurdo. Two of those five members, Yingfei Chen and Shannen Graham-Howard, are this year’s brave winter-over researchers. The other three, Dr. Chu, Gary Sutliff, and Ari Diddams, will be deployed to McMurdo for about 18 days in February to help repair and restore the group’s Fe and Na lidar transmitters. After those three head back to the United States la ..read more

To start a new winter season for 2024, Dr. Chu and I with the other three group members (Shannen, Ari and Gary) met at Houston International Airport and departed United States for New Zealand together. Chu Lidar Group members: Ari, Yingfei, Shannen, Gary, Dr. Chu (from left to right). This will be the first time for Shannen, Ari and Gary to reach the Southern Hemisphere, which makes them very excited. This trip will also be the third time for me and nearly 20th time for Dr. Chu to get to Antarctica through New Zealand. Hopefully, everything can be accomplished if the Lidar Group stays together ..read more

We met today with Nancy and Gianna at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History to discuss the early stages of designing a museum exhibit sharing the works of our McMurdo lidar campaign! We hope to share our excitement about STEM fields, while educating visitors about geospace and the role that our data plays in it. We’ll continue to develop this exhibit throughout the spring semester and possibly integrate some of our work into the existing Antarctic water exhibit. Shannen, Mariana, Dr. Chu, and Ari discuss a topographical diorama of Antarctica while brainstorming how we can demons ..read more

After quite extensive research on the conjugate photoelectrons by Dr. Chu and Yingfei, the rebuttal letter to the reviewers worked and the Boulder predawn TINa paper got accepted finally. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023GL105626 In the future, more comprehensive work should be done before submitting the manuscript. We are looking forward to getting more results published about Boulder TINa layers ..read more

Greetings from Christchurch, New Zealand!!! I still can’t believe everything! I got the news that I might be deployed to McMurdo Station, Antarctica two weeks ago, now I’m already waiting for my winter flight to the ice in New Zealand. I called Dr. Chu on Thursday at 2:31pm about my New Zealand Visa approval and called her again at 2:29pm on Friday about my arrival in Auckland, New Zealand (almost exact 24 hours after). This is like a miracle!!! I’m now the first person in Chu Lidar Group with two WINFLY trips — unprecedented in the group ever! As Dr. Chu said: “There will be difficulties or c ..read more

We have been hard at work since the last update, so it has been a while since I’ve posted. Last November, we first noted some strange results in our lidar signal, showing aerosols (suspended particles) from around 15-25 km in the air. This is higher than most clouds, but was out of season for when we typically see Polar Stratospheric Clouds. We kept an eye on these, and they continued to grow in strength and occurrence rate as the season progressed. One of the earlier observations of stratospheric aerosols in our data from this season Now that it is June, we are seeing such strong clouds that ..read more

To many “Antarcticans”, Antarctica is simply known as “The Ice”.  Celebrating birthday on the ice is a lucky thing to any Antarctican, and I became one of the lucky Antarcticans on Dec. 28, 2022, who celebrated birthday on the ice! The Chu Lidar Group planned a party for me in Crary library on Wednesday night and invited my close friends on the ice to celebrate my birthday. That was one of the best moments in my life — thank you all very much!!! Yingfei’s birthday cake and his favourite Dr. Pepper ..read more

Hello again! As I expected, once we hit the ice we quickly got busy with refurbishment and training to the point where blog updates were on the back of my mind. However, after hard work from the entire team and some long nights, we were able to return to operational capacity by mid-late September! After that point, each of us lidar team members trained to be able to operate the two lidar systems independently, and we we entered operation mode. We saw these beautiful cloud features late one night (11pm) when the sun set behind the Kiwi dome In order to capture all the data possible, we split th ..read more

Our major goal was to get to the lidar lab by the end of the month. However, this wasn’t an easy task. Since we arrived in winter, we had a large amount of additional training to do before we were allowed to leave the base on our own. Our training list was: a comms briefing, Antarctic field safety, lab safety training/tour, outdoor safety lecture, and a light vehicle briefing and practical exam. We actually managed to get all of these done with by mid-afternoon on August 31! We made our first introductory trip to Arrival Heights around dinnertime that night, and gave Arunima and Yingfei a tour ..read more