Hey Everyone,
Well I have now been in Norway for 2 months and away from home for just an extra week more than that. Things here are generally pretty good. The high cost of food and so forth doesn't bother me as much as it did (and maybe not as much as it should). Maybe next week (if I remember, I will post some pictures of food, and then the prices). I'll also try to do the same while I am on Svalbard as a comparison and maybe see if I can get someone back in Canada to send me some prices on a few select items.
I still haven't received my residence permit. The system is just backed up or delayed or whatever. I have spoken with the immigration office numerous times but there is not much to be done about it. The decision is now 5 weeks over their targeted processing time. Part of the reason is undoubtedly that many Norwegians take extensive holidays in the summer, making sure to enjoy the good weather and all the daylight hours. Otherwise, most thing are sorted out, or nearly so.
Work is going well, spending lots of time in front of my computer. I am working on two main projects right now, one for this exchange and one more directly related to my thesis. As a result I end up working many 12-16 hour days but that is okay, it is what I am here for. The past two weeks I have been house sitting and enjoyed working on a deck overlooking the ocean; it made it a little easier to work late each night.
On Thursday I will head to Svalbard and then on R/V Lance for a research cruise to Fram Strait off the east coast of Greenland. I will be on the boat for just about 3 weeks. I don't know if I will have the chance to blog from the boat. I will try, otherwise I will just write the blog posts up and then upload them when I return to internet land.
When I return to Tromso my supervisor visits Tromso for a few days. Then, and much more exciting (sorry Christian), my wife Nicole arrives for her visit just a few days later. She and I will take a few holidays together. I am really looking to seeing my wife, and imagine I will be looking to it even more in another month. We can still communicate fairly regularly using email, Facebook, FaceTime and Skype but it is not the same. We will be doing a little sightseeing in Norway and just spending some time together. We only get a couple weeks together, but that is so much better than no visit at all. I am very excited to see her and talk to her and sightsee with her.
Thinking on all my trips, my workaholic nature and love of my research, I realize how lucky I am to have such an understanding and supportive wife. Someone asked me once how we (as a couple) deal with the absences, and it is still a question to be answered. I feel like time apart is definitely good for couples, you miss each other, appreciate all the little things each other does and so forth. I guess both of us also don't want to be the person who is holding the other one back from doing what they love and/or what will help their career.
Unfortunately for her,Nicole definitely gets the short end of the stick, I travel far more than she does and for much longer periods. It is easier to be the person who goes away, they are usually on an adventure or seeing something new or some new country. The person back home gets to do all the household work without help and without the excitement of a new place.
While I am here in Norway I do have to look out for myself but I still have the excitement of new people, a new place and culture. Although honestly, I have probably been doing far to much working and far to little enjoying my surroundings.
Showing posts with label UAlberta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UAlberta. Show all posts
Saturday, August 3, 2013
Friday, August 2, 2013
#FieldPhotoFriday #CASIMBO @daring_lake
Ben Lange and J. Alec Casey use an ice auger to make a large hole in the ice. Photo converted to black and white high-contrast preset in Adobe Lightroom. Canon 60D ES 18-200mm: 18mm, f/14, T: 1/500
Buoy Update: IT'S HEADING NORTH!!!
So remember that buoy I was telling you about (well writing actually, but you know what I mean)....anyways, it is doing what I hoped...IT IS HEADING NORTH! for now.
In the map below you can see that it is now even with the Faroe Islands, or about even with Bergen in Norway.
Friday, July 26, 2013
One of my buoys beached! BUT WENT BACK OUT TO SEA!!!
Hey Everyone,
Today's post is a bit different, I will talk a tiny little bit about my research, but don't worry it should be fun or at least interesting.
I want to tell you about a buoy, a small buoy, that has had an interesting life and has recently beached on the Shetland Islands (Scotland).
Buoy 300234010730040 is a small iSphere drifting type buoy. These buoys, developed by MetOcean are designed to be deployed in open water and track the drift of the surface water. They are very much like the MetOcean SVP, or the MetOcean Polar iSVP but are more simple (maybe I should get paid some advertising money by MetOcean??). The buoys have a normal maximum life time of about 12-18 months, at least from our experience. They are rated for longer, but often stop working, either crushed by the ice or ??
They are used in the sea ice community as an inexpensive drift buoy for tracking the motion of sea ice, we just place them on the ice instead of in water. The buoys provide measurements of their position via GPS. You can also request other sensors such as air temperature, sea surface temperature, barometric pressure, humidity and other sensors (see the website).
Now Buoy 300234010730040 is a simple model, just has temperature and position. We deployed this buoy in the Lincoln Sea of the Arctic Ocean during the ESA CryoVEx campaign in April 2011. The Lincoln Sea is between Greenland and northern Ellesmere Island. It is the main study region of our group because the ice drifts towards the coasts in this region producing very thick sea ice that usually survives the summer to become multi-year ice. The Lincoln Sea sits north of Nares Strait, where sea ice can flow out of the Arctic Ocean to the warmer waters to the south and then melt.
During the CryoVEx campaign we deployed four of these buoys. We had two main research sites called North and South at 85.5 and 83.5, respectively. At each site we put out two buoys to track the location of the sites between two visits we made and for aircraft surveys over the sites. Above each buoy we placed a corner reflector. A corner reflector is just a bit of metal that is shaped into a corner and then point so that the bottom of the corner is down. When radar signals from the aircraft hit the corner reflector they bounce right back to the sensor. Normally, when radar hits a surface, only some of the energy goes back to the sensor, the rest is mainly reflected away.
Okay, so we used the buoys successfully during the campaign, we took down our corner reflectors on the second visit the in-situ team made and decided to leave the buoys to track the ice.
Okay, now the interesting bit, of the four buoys that we deployed, two are still working. One of the buoys from the north site died in October of 2011, so it definitely did not make the 18 month expected lifetime.
The second buoy from the north site is still operational, and amazingly is still in the Lincoln Sea. It has spent more than two years there now, it is a pretty interesting data record. In 2012, we looked for it from the air, but I think it was buried. I guess this because 1) they are bright orange and can be pretty easy to spot, and 2) the temperature profile from the buoy was very smooth in 2012, which may indicate it was buried in snow as the snow would limit fluctuations in temperature.
From the South site both buoys drifted out of the Lincoln Sea through Nares Strait in October 2011. And then their lives get interesting. Below is a map showing the positions from Buoy 30023401070040 (i.e. the buoy that is still going).
Both buoys drifted south into Nares Strait. Both had drifted quite aways south but then a strong wind from the south sent the ice drifting back up the strait but this time on the opposite side of the channel. Pretty cool.
After this they flowed south past Baffin Island and into Hudson Strait. The buoy that is still running drifted back out, while the other one beached on shore.
Here you can see that the buoy spent a bit of time circulating in and out of Hudson Strait/ Ungava Bay.
Since then the buoy has travelled all the way to Ireland, then most of the way back to Greenland and then now up to the Shetland Islands.
Buoy 300234010730040 travelled somewhere around 22,000km (I have not gone through all the gps points to remove outliers, but did remove a couple). 22,000km is longer than all of the coastline of the U.S.A. (according to the CIA World Fact Book (here), or a little less than 4 times the distance from Edmonton to Tromso, or (last one I promise) about 5 times the distance between Edmonton, AB and the North Pole.
Compare this to the buoy (300234010735050) that has stayed in the Lincoln Sea. In two years, it has travelled only about 1700km! That's less than 10% of Buoy 300234010730040.
Here is the temperature record from the buoy. Some interesting things, the melt in 2011, then maybe sitting in water, maybe a melt pond, or open water, then back down to freezing temperatures and then finally warming. Can see some points big changes in temperature in May and June 2012, but it was near Hudson Strait then.
If you look at all the buoys together, there are many cool features sitting in this data, for instance, Buoy S1 and S2 were together, separated by about 460m until September 5, 2011. Then the ice floes that each one was on started drifting apart, then smashing back together, then apart, and eventually one or both of the floes was/were turning and coming closer to the/each other.
OKAY! BACK TO THE BUOY'S DRIFTING LIFE:
Last week, the buoy was beached on a small beach near Gunnister, Shetland Islands, Scotland.
It spent a couple days on the beach, and then with a high tide ?? and maybe some wind and good fortune, it drifted back out to sea. Who knows maybe some one pushed it back out. In any event, it can continue on its' merry way. Below are some Google Maps Street View pictures of as close to the spot the buoy beached as you can get.
I had hoped it would go up the coast of Norway, but hey let's just see where time takes it. It is currently heading back out into the Atlantic towards Greenland ( though still not far from the Shetlands). I'll try to remember to post about this buoy when it finally dies, as it inevitably will. For now, the battery voltage is high (very high actually), so who knows where it will end up and when it will die, hopefully not for awhile.
Today's post is a bit different, I will talk a tiny little bit about my research, but don't worry it should be fun or at least interesting.
I want to tell you about a buoy, a small buoy, that has had an interesting life and has recently beached on the Shetland Islands (Scotland).
Buoy 300234010730040 is a small iSphere drifting type buoy. These buoys, developed by MetOcean are designed to be deployed in open water and track the drift of the surface water. They are very much like the MetOcean SVP, or the MetOcean Polar iSVP but are more simple (maybe I should get paid some advertising money by MetOcean??). The buoys have a normal maximum life time of about 12-18 months, at least from our experience. They are rated for longer, but often stop working, either crushed by the ice or ??
They are used in the sea ice community as an inexpensive drift buoy for tracking the motion of sea ice, we just place them on the ice instead of in water. The buoys provide measurements of their position via GPS. You can also request other sensors such as air temperature, sea surface temperature, barometric pressure, humidity and other sensors (see the website).
Now Buoy 300234010730040 is a simple model, just has temperature and position. We deployed this buoy in the Lincoln Sea of the Arctic Ocean during the ESA CryoVEx campaign in April 2011. The Lincoln Sea is between Greenland and northern Ellesmere Island. It is the main study region of our group because the ice drifts towards the coasts in this region producing very thick sea ice that usually survives the summer to become multi-year ice. The Lincoln Sea sits north of Nares Strait, where sea ice can flow out of the Arctic Ocean to the warmer waters to the south and then melt.
During the CryoVEx campaign we deployed four of these buoys. We had two main research sites called North and South at 85.5 and 83.5, respectively. At each site we put out two buoys to track the location of the sites between two visits we made and for aircraft surveys over the sites. Above each buoy we placed a corner reflector. A corner reflector is just a bit of metal that is shaped into a corner and then point so that the bottom of the corner is down. When radar signals from the aircraft hit the corner reflector they bounce right back to the sensor. Normally, when radar hits a surface, only some of the energy goes back to the sensor, the rest is mainly reflected away.
 |
| Buoy and Corner Reflector. Photo Courtesy of Rosemary Willatt, (C) 2011. |
Okay, so we used the buoys successfully during the campaign, we took down our corner reflectors on the second visit the in-situ team made and decided to leave the buoys to track the ice.
Okay, now the interesting bit, of the four buoys that we deployed, two are still working. One of the buoys from the north site died in October of 2011, so it definitely did not make the 18 month expected lifetime.
The second buoy from the north site is still operational, and amazingly is still in the Lincoln Sea. It has spent more than two years there now, it is a pretty interesting data record. In 2012, we looked for it from the air, but I think it was buried. I guess this because 1) they are bright orange and can be pretty easy to spot, and 2) the temperature profile from the buoy was very smooth in 2012, which may indicate it was buried in snow as the snow would limit fluctuations in temperature.
From the South site both buoys drifted out of the Lincoln Sea through Nares Strait in October 2011. And then their lives get interesting. Below is a map showing the positions from Buoy 30023401070040 (i.e. the buoy that is still going).
Both buoys drifted south into Nares Strait. Both had drifted quite aways south but then a strong wind from the south sent the ice drifting back up the strait but this time on the opposite side of the channel. Pretty cool.
After this they flowed south past Baffin Island and into Hudson Strait. The buoy that is still running drifted back out, while the other one beached on shore.
Here you can see that the buoy spent a bit of time circulating in and out of Hudson Strait/ Ungava Bay.
Since then the buoy has travelled all the way to Ireland, then most of the way back to Greenland and then now up to the Shetland Islands.
Buoy 300234010730040 travelled somewhere around 22,000km (I have not gone through all the gps points to remove outliers, but did remove a couple). 22,000km is longer than all of the coastline of the U.S.A. (according to the CIA World Fact Book (here), or a little less than 4 times the distance from Edmonton to Tromso, or (last one I promise) about 5 times the distance between Edmonton, AB and the North Pole.
Compare this to the buoy (300234010735050) that has stayed in the Lincoln Sea. In two years, it has travelled only about 1700km! That's less than 10% of Buoy 300234010730040.
Here is the temperature record from the buoy. Some interesting things, the melt in 2011, then maybe sitting in water, maybe a melt pond, or open water, then back down to freezing temperatures and then finally warming. Can see some points big changes in temperature in May and June 2012, but it was near Hudson Strait then.
If you look at all the buoys together, there are many cool features sitting in this data, for instance, Buoy S1 and S2 were together, separated by about 460m until September 5, 2011. Then the ice floes that each one was on started drifting apart, then smashing back together, then apart, and eventually one or both of the floes was/were turning and coming closer to the/each other.
OKAY! BACK TO THE BUOY'S DRIFTING LIFE:
Last week, the buoy was beached on a small beach near Gunnister, Shetland Islands, Scotland.
It spent a couple days on the beach, and then with a high tide ?? and maybe some wind and good fortune, it drifted back out to sea. Who knows maybe some one pushed it back out. In any event, it can continue on its' merry way. Below are some Google Maps Street View pictures of as close to the spot the buoy beached as you can get.
In the picture below you can see the beach where the buoy beached. Nice place for a rest.
I had hoped it would go up the coast of Norway, but hey let's just see where time takes it. It is currently heading back out into the Atlantic towards Greenland ( though still not far from the Shetlands). I'll try to remember to post about this buoy when it finally dies, as it inevitably will. For now, the battery voltage is high (very high actually), so who knows where it will end up and when it will die, hopefully not for awhile.
#FieldPhotoFriday
I know a few scientists/researchers who post a field photo on most Fridays. I thought I'd try it.
Today, way back from my work as an undergraduate summer field assistant in 2007 on West Washmawapta Glacier in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, with @JLKavanaugh
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
MY ARDUINO WENT TO SPACE!!! PICTURES AND DATA TO PROVE IT!!!
Hello Everyone,
Well normally I would post this on my microcontroller blog, but I think this is general enough (not that my microcontroller blog is technical in anyway), to include here. I want to talk about launching my Arduino microntroller and sensors into SPACE, well to be specific to 30km altitude, or about 3 times the height that a transatlantic flight flies at.
My system:
On my microcontroller blog I had posted about getting myself an Arduino microcontroller, basically a very small, very cheap computer; a GPS chip to measure position, altitude and speed; a temperature and pressure sensor; and a microSD card device to store data to. With these components wired up to my Arduino I wrote some code to log the GPS data and the temperature and pressure data to a microSD card two times per second for as long as the system had power.
That covers the system, if you want a bit more information check out my microcontroller blog at http://justinbeckers-microcontrollerfuntime.blogspot.ca/2013/02/building-gps-temperature-and-pressure.html.
The Launch:
This term of University I am a teaching assistant for the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences course EAS327: Environmental Instrumentation. In this course, students learn about electronics, about designing and building environmental sensors, and gain practical experience with systems such as dataloggers, weather stations, GPS, and a variety of environmental sensors.
This year, we teamed up with the University of Alberta ISSET (Institute for Space Science, Exploration and Technology) to launch a high altitude balloon into the upper atmosphere.
As our course is an environmental instrumentation course we decided to launch my arduino and sensors as well as two thermistors (resistors whose resistance is a function of temperature) to measure the temperature. These two thermistors were quickly built by the course professor, Dr. Jeff Kavanaugh, with whom I did some undergraduate work back in 2007/08. The idea is that the students will use the temperature, pressure and GPS data to write a report for the course. Dr. Kavanaugh also had a GoPro 2 camera to launch with the balloon to take pictures every 5 seconds.
Okay, enough background, let's get to the actual launch.
On Sunday, April 7, 2013, we launched the balloon from the University of Alberta. We filled the balloon with helium so that it can lift the payload (the arduino, the go pro, parachute and some other items for the ISSET group. The balloon ascends and as it ascends it expands because the air pressure outside the balloon is decreasing. Our balloon ascended to nearly 30km up. At this altitude (3X the flying height of a transatlantic flight) we are above about 99% of the mass of the atmosphere!!
So here I have a few pictures and few graphs of data.
First the pictures.
The pictures are from Dr. Jeff Kavanaugh's GoPro Hero2 that was in the payload container. Please note that you may not use the pictures for any purpose, commercial or otherwise, without express written consent from Dr. Jeff Kavanaugh (you can email me and I can ask him for you). Luckily, I have received permission from Dr. Kavanaugh so that I can show these to you here. Note the blackness of space, the thin blue curve that represents the of the atmosphere and the cloudy skies with occasional peeks of the ground. In the 5th image down, you can see Miquelon Lake, which I studied for my Master's thesis.
Some data:
Being a bit of a science geek, I thought it might be cool to show some of the data that was collected. I won't be doing presenting any analysis here, just showing the measurements, but they are pretty cool. Here I am just going to show data from the balloon while it was rising.
First is the altitude. This altitude is measured by the GPS unit. We found out later that it seems to have got the wrong altitude for the first 17 minutes of the flight, then suddenly the GPS altitude is corrected. I am not sure what caused this, but the jump also appears in the Temperature and Pressure data and so it could be related to the power supply going to the microcontroller and to the various components. But you can see that the balloon rose to nearly 30km, again that is higher than about 99% of the mass of the atmosphere and about 3 times higher than your transatlantic flights.
I've also included a link to a Google Earth KMZ file. If you have Google Earth on your computer you can just go to File, Open, and select this KML file (from where ever you downloaded it). This will let you see the 3D track. Google Earth KML File. If the page opens up a map view with nothing in it, there should still be a way to download the .KMZ file from that map view.
Well hopefully you found the pictures interesting.
In 6 days, I head to the Arctic for another round of CASIMBO (Canadian Arctic Sea Ice Mass Balance Observatory) measurements. I will try to blog this year, but no promises, depends on how much work we do and how many hours I will have for sleep/blogging.
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