Hello everyone!
I'm overdue to fill you in on progress on my Antarctic trip. My flight down as good, as I had noted in my last e-mail - only 7.5 hours on the C-130 Hercules.
Since then, I've been busy with daily activities with the work I do here. Especially working on getting repairs to broken down equipment, and setting up new equipment/computers to do our job here.
Below is a summary of what the AMRC does, for those of you who might not know what we are exactly up to here at McMurdo Station:
The Antarctic Meteorological Research Center (AMRC), a research group at the University of Wisconsin - Madison's Space Science and Engineering Center, supports the various National Science Foundation grantees in the United States Antarctic Program with weather and remote sensing data. Our offices at the Crary Laboratory at McMurdo Station, and at the University of Wisconsin, collect and archive various satellite and weather data. This data is available upon request, free of charge, to the world's scientific community. AMRC provides users at McMurdo Station access to weather and remote sensing data in near real time. One of the key products we offer is a composite of weather satellite imagery over he Antarctic continent. Combined with other data, especially polar orbiting weather satellite imagery data, the AMRC arhive has over 1.2 Terabytes worth information archived.
Its a quick summary, but I hope give an idea. To see more, check out the AMRC web page at: http://uwamrc.ssec.wisc.edu
As side from my initially getting started with my work, the weather has been nice....but it looks like it won't last, as the winds are picking up from the south, and the clouds have rolled in and the ceiling onthem is lowering. Hopefully, it won't turn out too badly.
Take care, and I'll talk to you all later,
Matthew