Hangar barbeque and boat shed party tonight.

Our last flying day. We have to be finished by 3pm to take the instruments off of the aircraft in the afternoon. That gives us saturday to pack as our departure on the Dash-7 has been brought forward to Sunday 4th.

We did a final test flight with Ian, (flight60) with the air inlet fitted to look at flow rates in flight for using with the Licor next year and a ground GPS calibration survey of the aircraft antennas.

Russ is on gash. Bar pub quiz tonight. Emma went along Reptile ridge and Alex finally got to see down the crevasse.

A busy day. Russ and Geoff flew back early from Fossil Bluff and the aircraft weather radar was soon fixed. We flew a short calibration flight (flight58).

There was a major incident exercise on base while Alex headed off in the afternoon with Geoff again out into the Weddell Sea to the east of the Peninsula (flight59). She didn't return until around 10:30pm local time, well after dark. It's always great to see the runway lit up with all its lights, although not quite so great for Geoff to discover both the aircraft landing spotlights had failed. Imagine driving a car without headlights... but it was a fine landing.

Russ headed off for the third flight over the Ronne Polynya (flight56) via Fossil Bluff (flight57). The aircraft weather radar failed on the way out but the weather was good enough on the Ronne ice front to still collect a good data set.

On the return, the weather at Rothera deteriorated and without a working radar, Geoff and Russ are spending the night at Fossil Bluff.

Emma heads off for the second Ronne Polynya flight (flight53, flight54, flight55) today. There is far less cloud around so it should be a successful flight. Discovered this morning that the glued PIR dome had cracked again in several places and there was a chunk of dome missing making it useless. Might have been due to the rapid temperature changes on the balloon following ascent/descent or landing yesterday.

Tom is on forecasting duties again as Mike is flying. Alex and Russ are catching up on processing previous flights and starting paperwork and marking crates for return cargo.

Too much cloud in the wrong places today for the Ronne. Alex has headed off to the sea ice at the North West Corner of Alexander Island (flight51).

In the afternoon, our aircraft was borrowed for some air to air photographs and then Russ and Emma flew with Gary to follow a balloon ascent up to 10000'. There were problems with the main temperature sensors on this flight. (flight52)

Fluxes from yesterday's Ronne Polynya flight look very good and show the fall off in fluxes as you go away from the ice shelf over the polynya/thin ice. This great success however came with the realisation last night that the downward looking video camera had failed to record. Such is the nature of fieldwork. There is at least some video that Tom took with the handheld video camera.

The UK launches its part in IPY today before the official launch in Paris on March 1st.

Mark and David departed taking the first of the twin otters North. Alex is on gash.

Meanwhile, Tom headed South again to Fossil Bluff for an attempt to collect data over the Ronne Polynya just to the North of the Ronne Ice Shelf. Our options are somewhat limited compared to a normal flying season as Sky Blu depot was closed last week and also the normal emergency fuel depots at North Sound and Atoll have already been removed for the winter which causes problems with the constant threat of fog at Fossil Bluff.

On the satellite image, Rothera is just squeezed into the left hand side. Cloud has been coloured, otherwise ice shows as white and ocean/thin ice as black.

Tom made it back to Rothera from his Ronne flight (flight49), reporting pancake ice in the polynya.

The VIPs depart North on the Dash-7 to Punta Arenas.

It's Folk night tonight before two of the Twin Otters head North tomorrow. There is a clip of a previous year's act .

The Ronne Polynya doesn't look suitable today due to icing cloud over the Peninsula, but Tom is taking the aircraft down to Fossil Bluff (clip) tonight ready for a flight in the morning hopefully.

You can see in the images Tom presenting his boarding pass before boarding (although a large fuel tank seems to have beaten him in the queue) and part of the in-flight service. We were prompted to take these images after reading and seeing images from the current GFDex project off Greenland using the FAAM aircraft. At least we haven't had to fly through 90+ knot winds though.

Unfortunately, the weather went down at Fossil Bluff and we were unable to land and returned to Rothera for Folk Night.

We are talking to the VIPs today when they come back down from camping on the skiway and showing them the instrumented aircraft. The BBC are reporting on the visit.

Weather pretty poor just about everywhere. Alex archived the weather charts.

There was a formal meal in the evening for our guests and to mark the final visit of the current BAS director before his retirement. His sucessor has not yet been announced.

Happy Wedding Anniversary, Tom and Mary!

The plan for today is to do aerial photographs of the MASIN aircraft while we are looking at satellite images in the morning as to where we can fly. However there is cloud everywhere and it's not sunny enough for photography.

Tom is on gash. In the afternoon Alex flew a flight (flight46) across the Peninsula looking at the flow structure and barrier winds. Emma went to look down the crevasse in the evening.

Flight tracks added to the flight data pages.

Mark and Alex headed off to Northern Alexander Island once we were absolutely sure that the Ronne Polynya wasn't a goer today (flight44). Lots of whales seen.

Mark and Emma head back to Alexander Island again in the evening (flight45).

The VIPs went to see BAS science at Fossil Bluff.

Snowy day here, so no flying just yet. Might have trouble getting into work ;)

The Dash-7 is coming today bringing the BAS director with Ron Oxburgh KBE, member of the House of Lords select committee on science and technology and Malcolm Wicks MP, Minister of State for Science and Innovation. Tom is putting the finishing touches to his presentation to them. We are due to talk to them and take them on a short flight on Wednesday morning.

We collected more ground pressure data inside the hangar to look at hygrometer pressure offset.

The weather cleared up before lunch and Alex got away to measure over sea ice around Charcot Island, however the flight was aborted due to bad weather en route (flight43).

Emma is on gash duties - domestic cleaning, laying tables etc.

Another day of the weather not really playing ball. Tom is looking at every satellite image as it comes in but it doesn't look very hopeful.

Russ up an extension lead to allow us to mount both IR Radiometers on the roof of the aircraft and ran a calibration between them on the ground outside. This also logged some more data of the offset between hygrometer pressure and other pressure sensors, which is confusing us.

The tourist ship M S Bremen arrived this afternoon. Tom and Alex became tour group leaders to show the tourists around the base. Emma was being a film star to promote IPY. Emma's supervisor, Ian Renfrew is actually now working on an IPY project in Greenland on GFDex.

Dash-7 went North today with Hamish and others.

Tom was successful yesterday in getting algorithms working for making our two moisture measuring instruments comparable. We have a Buck cooled mirror hygrometer which gives us absolute dew/frostpoints and a Vaisala Humicap sensor in a Goodrich inlet which gives us a faster resonse. It's not trivial, we have to account for the recovery factor of the Goodrich Inlet, the measured pressure inside the hygrometer (which differs from aircraft static pressure) and decide if the hygrometer is measuring with respect to ice or water whereas the humicap always measures with respect to water.

The skis have been replaced on our aircraft but no suitable cloud gaps to go and fly anywhere useful.

No flying today for us. Weather poor, a front coming through Rothera and there is a problem with our aircraft's skis. They will be replaced tomorrow morning by taking them from one of the other aircraft that has finished its work here for this season. The first two of the aircraft (but not ours) will leave here around February 26th and the skis are removed anyway before departing North for the last time.

The weather doesn't look great for the next few days, but we'll keep checking.

Two flights today. In the morning Alex headed East of the Peninsula with Mark flying to the Weddell Sea ice near Butler Island(flight41).

In the afternoon Emma successfully completed her first flight as solo operator back to a similar area with David flying(flight42).

Due to popular demand, the Weight chart has been updated!

There's a gap over the Weddell Sea today, east of the Larsen Iceshelf, so Alex is off to collect flux data (flight39).

Emma is running her model each morning using data from the Shelf AWS to give an idea of the sensible heat flux across the Ronne polynya. Today shows a prediction of high fluxes as it's cold and a good wind but unfortunately, it's too cloudy to be able to get a good flight down there.

In the afternoon it was still good on the Larson iceshelf, so Tom and Emma went which will also complete Emma's training (flight40). A successful day!

First thing we had to do today was go and fly the aircraft down from the skiway and set things up for the next one. Weather not great, but we did a short calibration flight (flight38) and took Emma as training. It's looking like we will get a spell of better weather in the Weddell Sea over the next few days.

Phil flew North today on the Dash-7.

At a first look, the glued PIR from yesterday seems to be giving consistent data. If we have spare time we could run it alongside the upwards pointing one here and also think about calibration before repair on return to UK.

A busy day today. The weather was good to fly over the sea ice to the North West of Alexander Island. However as we prepared the aircraft, we noticed that the downwards looking Infrared Pyrgeometer (PIR) had a cracked dome. Presumably from a piece of gravel being thrown up on landing at the end of the last flight as it was gusty across the runway when we touched down. We have no spare so we super-glued the dome back together.

Mark is still too ill to fly, so we had David as our pilot. It was a succesful 4 hour flight (flight37) with a good low level leg due to good contrast but with some loss of GPS. There were loads and loads of seals on the sea ice. Excitement on our return as there were gusty crosswinds making for a tricky approach. We only managed one wheel down and aborted and opted to land on the skiway where it was almost calm, so we got an evening stroll back down to base, leaving the aircraft up on the skiway overnight.

The weather isn't looking good anywhere we want to go this morning and Mark is feeling very rough again. This however gives us time to finish checking yesterdays data once we reprocess it with the BAT record timing offset and time on the ground to correct the BAT record timing offset problem in the logging software. Provisionally, moving the BAT Dynamic inlet intake seems to have performed well in the rain yesterday.

Robert Culshaw talked to the base in the evening.

Alex found she had cracked the screen on the back of her digital camera. The camera still takes pictures though. The funny thing is that she can no longer tell exactly what she is taking. Sometimes its a picture, sometimes a video and other times just a sound recording. We never know quite what to expect! Most of the photos on this page were taken by Alex, so it's a great shame about her camera.

Rainy, grey day today. Replaced the instruments we had been working on in the aircraft and it's serviceable, so we could fly if the weather improves.

Emma has started her base training. Tom is weather forecasting today as Mike the forecaster is flying.

We managed flight36 this afternoon. Just a quick sortie over the R.A.T.S site, 30 mins out to the south and back in convective boundary layer and finishing with radar altimeter calibrations over the runway.

This morning's trip to the hangar revealed a neatly repaired wing - looks like the fairies have been in overnight! In reality, it turned out that one of the mechanics on the two Ken Borek aircraft pictured yesterday had the correct tools and was qualified to make the repair. Dick is now starting to glue the de-icing boot back on and given a day or so for the sealant to cure, we should have the plane back on monday. The poor guy with the lost luggage in Punta Arenas is now no longer needed and will make his way back to Canada after his short break in Chile.

Although, I forgot to mention our pilot, Mark was in bed all day yesterday with the cold/cough lurgies that have been around base for several weeks now.

In data processing we had a discussion on what corrections need to be applied to the BAT Probe before calculating turbulence so that we all use the same processing software. On the hardware front we tracked down the source of noise on the floor PIR, isolating the camera record indicator and eliminating a ground loop in the IRT wiring now that we take both digital and analogue outputs.

But the real news of the day was the arrival of Emma on the Dash-7 giving us our full team of five ready to resume flying in earnest.

Grounded and the Dash-7 with the repair person is officially delayed until at least Saturday(10th) afternoon. We've been looking at turbulence spectra with some useful discussions between Tom, Alex and Phil resulting in Tom having to look at using the outputs from the accelerometers in the end of the BAT Probe to look for movement of the probe independent of the rest of the aircraft. The conclusion was though that it was actually noise in the GPS derived vertical velocities causing a spike in the spectra. Some nifty filtering of the velocity data has removed the spike.

Russ hopefully finally fixed the record timing issue in the logging software that has been present for a year. Tom showed BAS deputy director Robert Culshaw around the aircraft in the afternoon.

Graphs of pressure comparisons for flight35 added to the data page. It looks like there is a correction to be applied to the frostpoint (FPH) readings due to pressure changes in the chamber with airspeed and we may have got water (from cloud) into the BAT tubes after about time 20.8 (20:48) shown by the dynamic pressure differences.

It was a stunning day. The wind dropped and sitting on the stony beach it looked perfect for a quick dip.

Grounded. Rumour has it that the sheet metal worker to repair the wing has arrived at Punta Arenas. However it's believed his luggage is somewhere around Los Angeles, so we'll wait and see when they actually make it to Rothera. Maybe it will turn up here.

Today's scientific breakthrough. If you type 'Is Russ at Rothera?' into google then you get to this webpage. But then you also get here by asking 'Are there bats at Rothera?'.

Phil arrived from Halley with Martin Bell and Robert Culshaw.

Grounded. Work starts on removing the deicing boot from the wing ready for the sheet metal worker to get to work. He/she is now due to arrive at Rothera on Friday.

We replaced the BAT Probe head onto the boom after rewiring the heater. Russ checked the pressure tube connections by sucking through them, although it looks more like he was trying to play the latest musical instrument! (Don't laugh, someone here has been looking at using a sheepskin that we use for camping to make a drum).

We also looked for the source of noise on the frostpoint hygrometer pressure signal and outgoing radiometer dome temperatures but didn't find anything conclusive. We'll look at the data more closely tomorrow.

Grounded. Dash-7 is delayed coming south with passengers for JCR waiting for essential cargo to be released by customs in Punta Arenas but arrives mid afternoon before returning North. JCR departs.

Despite Russ going for a 15 mile run before breakfast he shows no sign of approaching Tom's weight. No doubt the weight graph will appear here at some point....

Just so it doesn't look like we've been totally idle, there are now some flight plots for flight34 and flight35. You can also view the flight tracks in Google Earth.

Alex is knocked out in the next round of the table tennis after a close match.

We are grounded still today but it was poor weather and snowing most of the day anyway. Might improve the skiing conditions ;-). All working indoors on data processing.

A quiet Sunday with good weather. Alex took the opportunity to go boating. Tom is reviewing a paper. Russ checks out the BAT Probe heater and of course goes for a run. The heater solid state relay has blown. There seems little point replacing it with the spare. We'll monitor the temperature from the logging system and enable/disable the heater ourselves from the power switches rather than having a thermostat control it.

It sounds like we wont get a decision on the wing until tomorrow afternoon and then it might involve someone coming down from Canada to look at it and/or fix it.

Wondering what it's like to land at Rothera? Take a look at this - note most of the snow has now gone.

Our first test flight in the morning, out over towards Alexander Island in search of some sea ice. Alex, Tom and Russ all onboard. All the instruments seem to be performing well except for the JAVAD GPS which loses lock as soon as we start to taxi and remains unusable for most of the flight. This harks back to the problems we had last year but seems even worse.

Once back on the ground, Russ erases all the settings on the GPS and reinstalls the updated scripts sent to us over the summer. We all take a short second test flight close to Rothera. Again we lose GPS lock soon after takeoff. Whilst airborne we reinstall some old setup scripts to all 4 GPS boards and the GPS jumps back into life and keeps lock for almost the whole of the rest of the flight. We do some test maneuvers to check the performance of the BAT probe.

It is also discovered that the bird strike (from a tern or Tom now thinks possibly a snow petrel) we had this morning has made quite a dent in the right hand wing leading edge. Pictures are sent to Canada and the aircraft is grounded awaiting instructions.

The day went quickly with yet more instrument checks and sorting cables, boxes, computers and talking with Mark our pilot. Rags checks the new connections to the Radar Altimeters and we connect them into the logging system.

Ropes and field training for Alex with a night out in a tent. Tom and Russ start to unpack boxes and check everything is here, which to our relief it is. Tom and Russ take the opportunity to help upgrade the ARIES HRPT weather satellite receiving system. This isn't entirely straight forward and takes several of us most of the evening and some of the night making sure there are passes for Mike the forecaster to use in the morning.

Punta Arenas to Rothera. At our second attempt we leave for Rothera from a wet Punta Arenas. Sat next to the Dash-7 was the Polar-First helicopter on its way north.

We had good views of the peninsula and Adelaide island as we approached Rothera.

Madrid to Santiago to Punta Arenas after a hectic connection in Santiago getting our bags through customs and onto the connecting flight.