Season 2022 - 2023 at Princess Elisabeth has started

The austral season at Princess Elisabeth has started since a few days. It will mainly be a maintenance season and no personnel from our science projects will be there this time. The team at the station will nevertheless take care of our instrumentation. In particular of interest will be how the instruments at the remote site in the mountains have survived - far away from the station and thus only powered by a small wind turbine, a solar panel and some batteries. We will keep you posted on it. 

In the meantime, there has been the first radio sounding of this season on 30 November 2022. On the plot below you can see the high wind in the stratosphere above 20 km height, indicating that the polar vortex was situated above the station. This time the ozone hole is not exceptional (see also the copernicus monitoring). However, still large enough for low total ozone at this time and therefore elevated uv radiation. This caused extreme uv conditions with the UV index rising around local noon above 10, see image below.

season's first radio sounding on 30 November 2022

UV index on 1 December 2022; with extreme values around local noon

Tonga volcano eruption pressure wave visible in our recordings

On Saturday 15 January, a volcano erupted near Tonga, with devastating effects. The immense eruption catapulted ash, particles and gases apparently deep into the stratosphere, with estimates up to 30 km height. Besides the disastrous impact on humans, the environment, infrastructure, the eruption sent also a pressure wave around the world, detectable by measurements of atmospheric pressure (e.g., in Belgium). We can even detect this signal in the recordings of the atmospheric pressure inside our nephelometer, running at Princess Elisabeth station - see image below. The eruption took place around 4am UTC (or 5pm local time Tonga). The pressure wave took around 9 hours (for the around 17000 km to the station. A first variation of the pressure of about 2 hPa was detected at 13 UT and a second one of about 1hPa at 15 UT (one wave took the one way around the globe, the other one the other way round).