Today we had our flight test and everything so far went according to plan. Juha Lemmetyinen from FMI is as we “speak” doing the first quality check on the radiometer data. Interesting fact, Juha is one of the scientists that worked with the old Hutrad 10 years ago and is very looking forward to this new dataset.

We are fortunate to have pilots that are used to challenging weather conditions with plenty snow and wind like we had today which would have caused plenty of cancelled flights back in Schiphol.

Tomorrow, we will temporarily split with half the team heading towards Svalbard in commercial airlines (me included), and the other half transiting with the Twin-Otter with one stop in Greenland before arriving in Svalbard (Longyearbyen) on Tuesday. Weather forecast for Longyearbyen is looking promising in spite of expected temperatures between -15^oC and -25^oC (ouch!).

More to come!

Tânia Casal (ESA Scientific Campaign Coordinator)

Acknowledgements to the whole team: Sampo Salo from Harp Technologies, Andreas Stokholm and René from DTU Space, Samuli Nyman from Aalto Univ. and Juha Lemmetyinen for working diligently in setting up and testing all the systems in the short time they had.