The major story of the last 24 hours has been the weather.  It was very windy (30-35 knots) most of the day yesterday, except for a brief period in the afternoon when it dropped to 15 knots or so.  A knot is one nautical mile per hour.  A nautical mile is about 1.1 regular miles, so the wind speed in miles per hour is about 10% higher than the speed in knots.  Confused yet?  Sorry, but scientists have to work in different units of measure all the time.  We also work in wind speeds of meters per second (about half the number for knots) – but I won’t bore you with any more of this.

Back to the subject of our weather: Not only was it really windy yesterday, but it was also quite warm. The temperature got to just a little above 51 degrees Fahrenheit and this was just short of the all-time record of 53.4 deg F for Palmer Station. Maybe this is just another sign of global warming.  An interesting fact about our warm temperatures yesterday was that the wind was coming from the north, which is mostly off of Anvers Island and the glacier.  How does air passing over a massive hunk of ice get to be so warm?

We were hoping that the winds would die down so that we could go out sampling today (Monday).  But that did not happen. In fact, I could hear the winds howling all night and around 3 am the sustained winds reached over 50 knots. The gusts got up to 63 knots (almost 70 mph).  That is close to hurricane force winds!   I copied the wind speed chart for you to see.   To prove that this was serious stuff, we all awoke to find that one of the stacked military cargo vans on the dock was knocked over – it nearly fell into the water!  This van weighs over 5000 pounds.    In the photo you can see that they were pulling the Zodiac’s out of the water.  This was to protect them from the waves.  Shortly after they pulled the boats, the winds settled down to 20-25 knots and they have stayed around there so far (its noon now).  Needless to say, there will be no sampling for us today. We will try tomorrow.  It is important for us to get out and sample as soon as possible after the wind event because the wind turbulence can affect how deep the water is mixed, and this in turn affects the concentrations of DMS and distribution of the plankton in the water column.

By the way, I added a Weather Underground link on my web site so you can see the current weather at Palmer Station – in English and Metric units! Its down at the bottom of the page.