Snow traffic control

Today was mostly an office day, analysing data and planning changes in the sampling protocols for the science techs to follow when I'm gone.

One of the more interesting things I got to do today, though, was play snow traffic controller. One of my colleagues, Liz Morris from the Scott Polar Research Institute, is on a snowmobile traverse with an assistant, and will be arriving at Summit later this week. We talked to her on the phone today and since she is coming from the South, a direct route into camp would take her through the clean air sector, where atmospheric sampling takes place and we never drive motorized equipment.

So I gave her a slightly longer route that will avoid the clean air sector. I plotted it out:


Here you can see Summit as the red star, and the skiway as the blue line next to it. GRIP, an old European drilling camp, is the blue star to the right. Liz's last sampling location on the traverse is T41, at the lower right. Between the end of the summit skiway and GRIP is almost a road, as people have visited GRIP a couple of times this season already. So I've given Liz a route that intersects the GRIP 'road' and heads to the skiway, then to camp. This way she'll avoid the clean air zone directly south of camp.