Belare season 2025-2026

This season at Princess Elisabeth station has started. The station team members arrived by mid-November and opened it. The station has been powered whole winter with no interruption and remote access has always been possible. Therefore we have now a new set of total particle number concentration continuous since January 2025, and the instrument is still running fine. 

This season we will have one member of the Paspartout project at the station, from around 20 December 2025 to mid-January 2026. The installations for sampling the chemical composition of the atmosphere have to be checked, samples taken and secured, and some installations will be de-installed and shipped back to Belgium, due to the nearing end of the project in spring 2026. The radiosoundings have been restarted on 17 November with a schedule of each Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Below is a plot of the sounding on 19 November 2025, showing higher winds around an inversion layer at around 3000 m altitude, high winds around the tropopause, and a rather humid troposphere. The station team installed also our ozone spectrophotometer which measures uv spectra and the total ozone column. This years Antarctic ozone hole is on the low side. However, currently the stratospheric air mass with low ozone is located more or less above Dronning Maud Land, the region of Princess Elisabeth station, with moderately low total ozone values around 240 DU. It means that the uv index is bit high. But compared to earlier years, still moderate. Below the uv index graph for 23 November is given. 

This season we will also start a new project, in collaboration with our colleagues of the Space Aeronomy institute. We will do reference ground-based total ozone measurements with three instruments: our Brewer ozone spectrophotometer, the Pandora instrument, and the BTS solar instrument. The objective of the project is to test the three instruments, also during austral winter, and to show the instruments ability to deliver high quality measurements in rough environmental conditions, enabling satellite and model data evaluation for Antarctica. In a coming post, I'll describe this project in more detail. 

 graph for the radiosounding on 19 November 2025

graph for the uv index for 23 November 2025

 

Belare season 2024-2025

The Paspartout project has been present at Princess Elisabeth Station during Belare 2024-2025. Our team member Paula Lamprea of Ghent University has been at the station from 11 January to 14 February 2025. She managed to complete all tasks. Below there is a short report by her on this work. This Belare season was very successful. Besides Paula's work near the coast, she re-installed the total particle number concentration counter at the station. This instrument is very sensitive and can measure also very very low particle numbers, but also high concentrations. It gives a good view on atmospheric processes going on. Our Brewer ozone spectrophotometer has also been re-installed and maintained. This season has seen no exceptionally large ozone hole (luckily). But because fhe future evolution of stratospheric ozone remains uncertain, ground-based ozone reference measurements like the ones at the station, will continue to be essential for evaluating the impacts of the Montreal Protocol, climate change, and related shifts in atmospheric chemistry, such as those caused by major wildfires. Another important step forward has been that the station operator acquired an hydrogen generator. The hydrogen produced by wind and solar energy has been used for filling the meteorological balloons for radio soundings. This self-produced hydrogen will replace the helium used up to now and it replaces also the costly and heavy shipping of the helium bottles. More about the station can be found here.

The first radiosonde lifted up by green-hydrogen at PEA

The radiosounding profile with the first official hydrogen balloon at PEA