#CryoVEx2014 Day 2

After a good night's sleep at the Capital Suites in Inuvik, I am ready for day 2.  It is 7:30am and I've been getting some stuff done.  We have a satellite phone for communications, we can use it to make phone calls, send SMS (text messages) and with it I can even tweet (@SIBeckers is my username on Twitter). We can also send emails with the satellite phone but last night none of them were getting through.

A little more searching online makes me think that I can only send emails to non institutional addresses (not to @ualberta.ca for instance) but can send to gmail.com

I've also had a look at the weather forecast for the next few days and checked some freely available satellite images of the Beaufort Sea. The weather is looking okay here in Inuvik but it is windy up in Sachs Harbour -17C but feels closer to -35C with the windchill.  The satellite images suggest there are some clouds in the area.

The satellite images come from the Canadian Ice Service who download and post images from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR).  The images are freely available. The satellite takes images with sensors that operate at several frequencies, one of which is radar. The nice thing about radar is that you don't need sunlight and it can see through some clouds (depending on which radar frequency you use). In the image below, water is dark, but so are some clouds. Other clouds are white (left side of image). The red box is very roughly where I will be.

Beaufort Sea AVHRR Image from 2014/03/13 at 1228 UTC. Red box is very rough indication of where I will be Image courtesy of the Canadian Ice Service.

I'll be keeping an eye on the satellite pictures, but more for interest than any real need.  The camps are deployed and that's all there is to it. The only interest is really looking at the ice and weather conditions in the region.

In an hour or so I will meet up with the others to pick up some breakfast and then it is off to the hardware store for some last minute items, bio friendly spray paint to mark the snow and ice, cable ties, odds and ends. Then some work on our snow survey marking tools and maybe a bit of work at the computer this afternoon. And hopefully I can schedule a couple more blog posts, but that is harder as I haven't done anything yet.  Probably that will happen in Resolute Bay later in just over a week.