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What is in a day at the King Sejong station..

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It is not easy to write a blog from Antarctica... Everyone wants to hear exciting things, see amazing photos. It is amazing, yes.. The glaciers around. Our iceberg melting and turning but not going away.   Cloud shapes.. Sometimes repeating the shape of our iceberg..  But everything, including the icebergs, becomes a routine. And the iceberg is there whatever we do. Work is nonstop – checking the weather forecast, measuring, sampling, preparing sensors, testing them, installing, launching radiosondes, studying the profiles, checking cloud height, writing notes, saving data, plotting and checking results, disinfecting sampling material, again sampling, measuring… I will try to tell a bit about our daily routing – let’s see if you stay with me until the end without pretty photos:)     Our day today started “unusually” – with a lake sensor testing in our so called “Dry Lab”.  Photo: Testing lake sensor in the Dry Lab. ©Irina Gorodetskaya Photo: Weather forecast for the day (we use publi
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An atmospheric river brings heat and rain… again

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Our first days at King Sejong were quite intense. Arrival afternoon of 1 February, we were checking out equipment, unpacking cargo, installing radiosonde ground station and did the first radiosonde launch already on 2 February evening at 21h local time (00UTC). Thanks for the help to Taejin, Won Soek and Minghi! It was a good “warm-up” because on 4 February we had an  atmospheric river scale 3  landfalling in the northern Antarctic Peninsula. We use “AR scale” to measure the strength and duration of atmospheric rivers – a bit like for the hurricanes. AR scale 3 means that vertically integrated (through the entire troposphere) moisture transport reaching the Antarctic Peninsula coast was above 500 kg per meter per second (moderate strength for mid-latitudes and quite intense for the polar regions!) during more than 48 hours. You can learn about the AR scale  here .  Figure: Image of an atmospheric river: colors and black arrows show integrated water vapour transport (see the narrow and
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Arrival to King Sejong

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We are back at the Korean Antarctic station King Sejong on King George Island, northern Antarctic Peninsula and continue our measurements and exploration of this beautiful and rapidly changing place. The project this year is APMAR2024 - Antarctic Peninsula surface Mass and energy balance: the role of Atmospheric Rivers, supported by the Portuguese Polar Program in collaboration with Korean Polar Research Institute . Photo: arriving to the King Sejong station on 1 February 2024. ©Irina Gorodetskaya APMAR2024 team is Irina Gorodetskaya (principal researcher at CIIMAR  and the project PI), Claudio Durán-Alarcón (junior researcher at CIIMAR) and Yosvany Garcia Santos (PhD student at the University of Concepcion in Chile and doing an internship at CIIMAR).  APMAR2024 continues the  APMAR2 and APMAR/TULIP projects. And this year we thank for support several KOPRI colleagues – Sang-Jong Park (senior researcher at KOPRI), Taejin Choi (senior scientist at KOPRI) and Won Seok Seo (PhD
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