Brian Powell

8/2/05: We have completed our 3rd successful CTD cast today. I was beginning to believe that maybe we as oceanographers didn't really measure anything anymore after sailing over 65deg of longitude and 10deg of latitude without taking a single measurement. We are fully in the ice and the work shifts have begun. The winds have been bitterly fierce today, gusting over 70knots and sustained at over 40. By the way, a knot is simply nautical miles per hour and a nautical mile is one minute of latitude; hence, 60 nautical miles is one degree. 1 nautical mile is roughly 1.15 normal miles. Now you understand why we use metric for everything. The temperature has increased dramatically with this low pressure system (which has brought the extreme winds). We had been stuck around -17C ambient, and now are around 0C ambient. Of course, the wind chill is a little excessive right now. Launching the weather balloons has been a little trying in the wind. The GPS unit on the radiosondes is necessary to measure winds. Once it starts moving much, it doesn't keep a lock on the viewable satellites and won't measure wind. So, basically, when the winds are interesting (like now) and we want to measure them, the radiosonde moves too much and won't measure them. It seems only capable of measuring winds no more than 3 meters per second. Stupid thing. We'll keep standing in the wind, getting blown around the helicopter deck trying to get it to work right...

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