Norway: Thoughts on Departing

Right now I am sitting in the Edmonton International Airport, waiting for my flight Amsterdam.  I will be visiting family there for six days before I go to Norway.  I have about 22 hrs of travel time ahead of me, as I fly to Toronto, then Warsaw (Poland) and finally Amsterdam.

I just said goodby to Nicole and to Jax and I am of many minds and emotions.

The husband in me is worried and a bit sad.  Today I felt not ready to leave, but realized that I would likely never feel ready to leave.  This will definitely be the time period that Nicole and I have spent apart in the time we have known each other.  I am sad because I won't get to see her, go on walks with her, do all the usual household things that normally seem so mundane and boring.  I won't even just get to sit and watch tv or read in the same room.  I worry about her, about how this separation will be for her.  I will be busy doing research, in a new place, meeting new people while Nicole remains in Edmonton, working, taking care of Jax and doing all of the household items, now without any help from me. I worry that she will be bored or lonely, that something will happen where I could help. I am also hopeful that from this we will both grow together. I have never really lived on my own, having moved from my father's basement to living with Nicole. I am not a great cook, but now, I will have no choice but to improve, or eat many many terrible meals.
Nicole and I talked a bit about this over the past couple days and we both realized how much more difficult this would be if there was no high-speed internet, no Skype or FaceTime. Imagine only having letters to talk to the person you love.

The dog owner in me is sad I won't be seeing Jax. Won't be walking with him, playing with him. Won't get to hear him bark or watch him play. Won't get to have him aggressively lick my face or stare at me until I walk him.  I won't get to smell that dusty but wonderful dog smell. For all I know, he will bark at me when I come home because he won't recognize me.

Even leaving my office was kinda strange.  I share an office with Alec, the other PhD student being supervised by Christian at the U of A. We see each other almost every day and talk about science, our research problems. We provide additional motivation to each other and try to help solve problems here and there, even just sounding out solutions to problems we have come up with.  Although we don't hang out much outside of work, Alec and I have many similar interests and thus I feel are good friends.  It was weird to realize that I won't be able to sound out solutions to a problem writing code or thoughts on analyzing Cryosat-2 data.


OKAY, enough feeling sad already, right?!

The scientist and adventurer in me is very excited and really looking forward to the trip. I'm going to NORWAY!!! Norway is a spectacularly beautiful country, mountains, fjords, and sparsely populated.  Tromso is a wonderful city, with lots to do and see. I've packed my camping gear, I am going to do some backpacking, even if it is just short weekend trips just outside of town, so be it.
And before that, I get to see my family in The Netherlands, something I only get to do every few years. I get to try to recall my knowledge of Dutch thought it is fading over time as I don't use it enough. Luckily it will come back a bit while I am there.


I will be working at the Norwegian Polar Institute at the Fram Center.  The Fram Center hosts numerous scientific institutes besides the Norwegian Polar Institute and I will get to meet and hopefully talk to and learn from the people in different disciplines. I will get exposed to new ways of looking at science and research and at my own research questions.
I will be meeting new people and making new friends.  I've been lucky so far that my travels across the world have given me friendships across the world, with people in my own research discipline and outside of it.
I'm going to be working with some exciting data that hasn't really been examined. Data that should provide some new insights into sea ice surface roughness properties and distribution.
I will be doing another research expedition by boat, a research cruise. 

I am going to be blogging during this trip, hopefully sharing more than just  thoughts. I want to share my adventures, the sights, the science, the people I meet with you. As I mentioned in the previous post, I will also share some more about the CASIMBO campaign in Alert this year.

Tromsø Norway: My home for the next 7 months

Hello everyone, 

You may or may not know that I am moving to Norway for 7 months. In September 2012 I applied for an international mobility fellowship to do research in Norway. The grant, funded by the Research Council of Norway, provides me with a stipend to live in Norway for 7 months. I will be working with laser scanner data acquired during a cruise I took with the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI) in 2010. I will be working at NPI in Tromsø from early June until just before Christmas. 

I leave Edmonton today, heading first to The Netherlands to visit family and then to Tromsø. I will post some thoughts and feelings I have about this trip later today. I will try to blog on a weekly basis or more frequently while in Norway so that you can share in my adventure.

A quick note, I did not get many chances to blog while at Alert again this year. All the good weather just made me too busy, and unfortunately sleep had to take priority. The campaign was a huge success and I will try to provide some pictures, plots and stores over the coming weeks.

Okay, that is all for now.

Justin

GOOD WEATHER MEANS BUSY DAYS

Hello Everyone,

Well it is now day four of this year's CASIMBO campaign. We have had
amazing weather (-15 to -20C), sunny, only the slightest of breezes.
Due to the great weather, we have been very busy with our sampling.
On Day 2, everything came together for the biology sampling and the
work was completed. We also did two sites for our our ice thickness
measurements that day. Another long day for everyone.

Yesterday, we took a slightly shorter day, working only until 7pm, and
had a chance to get caught up on some sleep, but we still collected
some ice cores, did light measurements and completed a ice thickness
measurement site.

Today we did another ice thickness site and more coring and light measurements.
I'll provide more details on the coring and light measurements soon,
but I need to get some work done and then to bed (it is 10:30pm now).

The sites keep moving farther from shore, meaning time spent on the
skidoo is increasing, plus we are all a bit sore from all the work.
Nothing some advil, stretching and good nights sleep won't cure. But
since the weather is good, we will keep pushing, as the weather will
likely be bad eventually (and if not, then we will just have alot of
data/measurements).

Well I am off.

Until next time

DAY 1 Complete: A day where many little things went wrong.

Hey Everyone,

 

Only a quick note, have to enter data yet (yep its 11:30pm and I've been up since 6:30) but that is okay.

 

Okay, yesterday we got in a 2pm, got assigned our rooms, did a briefing, had supper and then unpacked/loaded the skidoo's/sleds to get ready to go out this morning and set up a few of our buoys to test that they work before we deploy them next week.

Everything was working normally and it looked good. Got to bed around 1:30 or so.  Up at 6:30, got dressed, ate breakfast and went to get the skidoos ready to go. Left by 9:30. On site by 10:00

 

Alec, Anne and I performed our transect measurements of ice thickness, snow depth, snow surface height and Anne walked around with an electromagnetic induction device that we use to measure ice thickness.

Ben and Ido were going to core 18 cores today at two sites, but both coring engines failed.  We also had many difficulties with another motor for drilling 6 inch holes for an experiment Ido is doing.  Finally we also had one skidoo break down, leaving us with three, and then another one of those had a steering failure.  Ben and I fixed this when Ben suggested using a piece of wood (bamboo pole we use to hold survey measuring tapes in place) to tie the one ski to the other. It worked okay, well enough for us to get back by 7pm, then a quick dinner and then setting up buoys until about 10:45, now it is time for data entry.  Okay talk to you soon

 

BYE

RESOLUTE IN MY DESIRE TO GO NORTH

Hello again everyone, well it is day two and I am already doing better than last year for writing blog posts (I think).

Today was our only (hopefully; provided the weather co-operates tomorrow) day in Resolute Bay, NU.  In Resolute we stay at the Polar Contintental Shelf Program Base, a very luxurious set of buildings with a kitchen, laundry, showers, hot water, beds, etc.  There is excellent food, and I always eat way too much.

Today was spent organizing equipment, testing equipment and generally just getting ready to go to Alert.  We packed our equipment onto one of the airplanes and then tomorrow morning at 7:30 am we will load ourselves onto the second airplane.

Below is just a few pictures from while I was walking about, doing work etc.

 

 

Alec, Anne and Ido inspecting the equipment

 

A Ken Borek Twin Otter

 

A helicopter safety sign I enjoyed

 

The pallet with all of our field equipment.

Back to the Beautiful Frozen North

Hello Everyone,

Well I am back in the Arctic, Resolute Bay to be precise (roughly 75N,95W... If my memory serves me right; it often does not). Okay so really I am writing this on my phone while we are in the air, as my computer is acting up (hard drive problems= 1st thing to go wrong this trip)

This trip I am with Alec Casey, Ido Hatam, Ben Lange and Anne Bublitz. Alec is a PhD student at the U of A in my research group;we share an office and Alec works with satellite images to provide new measurements of sea ice, such as thickness and roughness. Ido Hatam is a PhD student in microbiology at the U of A; he is studying the population dynamics if the microbial communities in the sea ice. Ben Lange is a PhD student at the Alfred Wegener Polar and Marine Research Institute in Germany. Ben is a sea ice biophysicist studying the biology associated with the bottom of the ice. This year Ben is looking at the penetration of light into and through the sea ice.
Anna is a PhD student at York University, a geophysicist by training she is on her first trip to the Canadian High Arctic. She is going to be learning the trade and helping Alec and I learn more about electromagnetic induction.
I am collecting sea ice thickness, snow depth and surface roughness information for the validation and calibration of measurments of sea ice from airborne laser altimeters, airborne electromagnetic induction and Cryosat-2 a satellite radar altimeter.

We will be in Resolute Bay until Friday when we will take a Twin Otter to Alert. We will do measurements on the ice that is frozen to the shore for the first week or so and then we will hopefully use a plane to do a couple of landings on sea ice, drop some buoys and our regular measurements. Stay tuned for more examples of the measurements details on the buoys and some pictures.


Bye for now!

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.

 Next we have the temperatures that were measured, the blue is measured outside of the box that held all the equipment, while the red is within the box and the green is measured on one of the circuit boards. It is pretty cool to see all of the structure in the air temperature measurements outside the box.  These are different layers within the atmosphere with different temperatures. The red curve is a little noisier than I was hoping for but shows that the inside of the box stays much warmer than outside (as expected, and not surprising).

 The next plot below is the air pressure with altitude.  Here you can see that air pressure decreases as we go up, and that the curve is pretty smooth but decreasing exponentially. As my air pressure sensor is only designed to work up to 8000m, or around 300millibar, I was quite happy to see that it worked the entire way up.  The lowest we measured was something like 9 or 10 millibar.

 Finally, this is just plot of the track the balloon took in UTM Northing and Easting coordinates. The red part of the track is the ascent, and the blue is the fall.  You can see that the GPS did not turn back on right away.  I'll have to work on this for any future launches.

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.