[Dale Andersen]. Keith, The last few days we have worked hard to get our camp set up. We are almost there, with everything but the lab tent and dive tent in place. We have been focused on ensuring the camp is prepared for inclement weather.
In fact, we expect a significant change in the weather starting tomorrow afternoon or evening, and Wednesday and Thursday may be particularly onerous, with high winds and perhaps snow.
Working in polar regions is never easy, but sometimes the search for new knowledge requires that we push our limits, physically and mentally, to reach the goals we have set. Not that we take unnecessary risks: we work hard to manage risk, with safety always taking precedence in all that we do.
So we will wait out the wind and blowing snow, and hope that our camp remains intact! More soon!
Dale
Weather Forecast for Lake Untersee, Monday 9 November, 2130 UTC
Tonight is clear, calm and cold at the lake, near −20 C. Tuesday brings the change: an east-south-easterly wind builds through the day to 15 to 20 knots by evening as cloud spreads in ahead of a low pressure system passing along the coast to our north. The wind strengthens sharply on Wednesday morning. From about midday Wednesday through Thursday evening the forecast models give sustained winds of 35 to 50 knots (65 to 90 km/h) with gusts of 55 to 70 knots (100 to 130 km/h), accompanied by snow and heavy blowing snow that will reduce visibility across the lake to near zero at times. The strongest model puts the gusts close to the 36 m/s record measured at our station here between 2008 and 2013. Several centimeters of snow are expected, most of it on Wednesday, and in that wind nearly all of it will drift against the camp rather than settle on the ice. Temperatures rise through the storm, from −20 C to about −7 C by Thursday, as the easterly draws in maritime air.
The wind eases through Friday, 20 to 25 knots in the morning falling to about 12 knots by afternoon under overcast skies and a mild −5 C. Saturday is the first candidate for a calm, clear day, though the models have not yet settled on it.
The forecast comes from five global weather models, which agree on the timing of the storm but not on its strength. Those models work on grid cells 10 to 25 km across, so they cannot see the mountains and glacier valley that funnel the wind over the lake, and they do not use the data from our own weather stations here. Both of those effects tend to make the real wind at camp stronger than the models say, so we are preparing for the upper end of the range and will be checking the forecast against our instruments as the storm comes through.
Location of Dale’s base camp on the shore of Lake Untersee, Antarctica — Google Earth
You can see all of the status reports and related articles from this field season and past seasons here at Dale Andersen’s Field Reports
Astrobiology, Exploration, Antarctica,
