The North wind that blows no good...

This morning the winds were from the North. This is a bad thing for Science at Summit, because there are a large number of "clean" chemistry experiments here, lookging at snow chemistry and air chemistry, all depending on the prevailing Southerly wind to keep the exhaust from camp from blowing into the "Clean air" sector, which is to the South of camp.

When the wind is from the North, many Camp operations shut down. We'd planned to move much of the wummer cargo to the winter-over berm today, but this would have required the use of the Cat forklift, and heavy equipment does not operate on North wind days.


The Cat forklift and the Argo sit motionless, keeping thier exhaust from fouling the clean air sector.

This also caused a change in schedule for science- we'd planned to take some snowmachines to survey a long accumulation and surface topography line outside of camp, but with the North wind we didn't want to run any engines if we could avoid it, even just to get out of camp.


The wind isn't enough to push our new wind generator...

By the afternoon, the wind had died entirely. This is still not enough to operate the equipment, as we want at least 3 knots of wind from the south, to carry the exhaust away.

I took advantage of the lull to test our GPS equipment and work on the protocols for a new GPS surveying experiment, which we'll try to perform tomorrow.

So, better luck tomorrow. The forecast is for more of the same, but we'll be pressed for time- camp will "close" a week from today, leaving the winter-over crew of just 4 souls for the next 3 months!