The Layer to Temperature Ratio

As awesome as the weather was at the time I posted last, the weather has since become equally poor. The past few days have been cold and snowy! We even got some accumulation, and not just on the mountains. The high has been ranging from 2⁰ C to 4⁰ C, and it is certainly cold enough to snow. It makes me really glad that I brought some long underwear along! I’m working the layer system. A t-shirt, light fleece shirt, pullover and fleece jacket, along with gloves and a wool hat is what I wear on cold days.

We got done working on Tuesday in the early afternoon which was nice. I took the afternoon to take a walk up toward the road with my camera and explore some of the places on Kálfaströnd that I hadn’t seen yet. There were a few birds that I hadn’t run into quite yet, and I used the time to familiarize myself with some of the local birds that I had been seeing every day but still couldn’t indentify. I saw two pairs of Horned Grebes, and I was in a place where I could snap a couple of decent photos without scaring them away. Also I saw a bunch of pink-footed geese, Barrow’s Goldeneyes and other assorted waterbirds. It was kind of nice to just be hiking around even though it was cold and there was some precipitation in the air.

Goldeneyes... I accidentally deleted my good photos of these guys

Wednesday we worked for most of the day putting up some experiments and such at a site known to me only as “hell” although I think it is more appropriately known as “HEL”… which is the abbreviation of the Icelandic name which I don’t know at this point… but anyway the site is out on a ridge in the middle of a wind-swept plain, and today the wind was surely sweeping and blowing snow around. But luckily the layer system did not fail me and I stayed fairly warm throughout. We finished work at a decent hour and after dinner we had a “party” which really was the four of us and Jasmine, the German student who is at the station for a number of weeks, just sitting around playing some drinking games. We had a really good time. Bre was an incredible question master and I fell victim to her traps numerous times (You have to answer the Question Master’s question with a question).

All our hard work paid off and today we enjoyed a day off. David, Kyle and I drove the hour to Akureyri in order to do some grocery shopping and run some various errands. The city is the second largest outside of Rekjavik and its surroundings, with a population of around 30,000. It is at the end of a large bay on the north end of the Island. We didn’t get to spend much time in the city, proper, but it was nice to be in civilization nonetheless. After our errands we went to the airport to pick up Claudio, who is the professor from UW in charge of this entire project that I’m working on. It was the first time I had met him, as he was in Italy for the entire semester.

We stopped at Goðafoss on the way to Akureyri

Things are still going great here, despite a bum finger (it got slammed in a door that the wind blew shut) and the poor weather. I’ll write some more in the next couple of days about some of the fun stuff we’re doing and some more about the project. Also check out the blog uwmyvatn.blogspot.com, the official blog of my research group here. We update that almost daily.