Most of my work week has been filled with trainings about various things relating to my specific role, about working in Antarctica, and about working with Antarctica New Zealand. We’ve had some other tasking as well, such as shopping for a few items of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment - insulated work gloves, tinted safety glasses, safety toe boots) for our roles, and gathering some equipment that we’ll need this season.

We’ll operate a skiway at the field camp, which involves making weather observations that are used to decide whether it’s safe to fly planes in the first place, and to provide to pilots when they do fly. An important part of the weather observation is the cloud ceiling figure, which is quite difficult to estimate in general, but even harder from a flat ice shelf!

One errand was to University of Canterbury, to pick up a ceilometer - which is essentially a specialised LIDAR used to measure the cloud ceiling. With this instrument, the weather observer can simply read a number off from the ceilometer computer - no estimation required.

At UC, we set up the ceilometer to understand how it operates, then we partially disassembled and packed it in to a few “space case”s which will fly South in the next few weeks. When we set up the feild camp, one of my projects will be to reverse those steps to help ensure my safe flight back to Scott Base!