KHO 102

Today we woke up late (and when I say we I mean Stu) so we headed down the hill and into town to get some food from the shop and collect our Norwegian ID numbers. We then headed back to the sea garage to collect our now fully charged scooter battery meaning that hopefully by the end of the week we will have it ready to head up onto the glacier on the weekend.
After lying around UNIS for a bit we headed to the car that would take us up to KHO. The trip up to KHO was uneventful compared to yesterday and we got here in good time. The temperature is slightly higher with wind chill taking it down to -29 which when compared to yesterday’s -41 is positively warm. We once again were split up into the two groups separating tasks between making space weather predictions and looking at the 1m spectrometer.
Our group started by making space weather predictions starting with data from SDO and SOHO then out to ACE and finally using NOAA GOES magnetometer data to predict the possibility of an auroral sub-storm in the next few hours. The results came up with a resounding NEGATIVE. Although, there are two large coronal holes on the Sun and a few active sunspot regions, that could produce some activity over the next few days.

We then moved onto looking at the 1m spectrometer with Dag, the door to which is located outside so, making a mad dash for it we got into the warm control room. The 1m spectrometer is based on a periscope design with an order sorting filter and a curved slit matching the geometry of the mirror. Stu had to go outside to clear off some now and ice that had formed over the viewing window. This is a picture of him through the viewing periscope from the inside of the warm instrument room.

We are now waiting for some activity to show up so that we can make/take some measurements. Looking at the ACE data we can see that there is a brief drop in the bz component of the magnetic field which we need to be negative and given the speed of the particles and time taken for the migration of the Earth’s magnetic field we may have some aurora at around 2230 UT.