Visit to Cake Eater Lab

Kerri and Kyle (Purdue Univ.) claim that their life at the Cake Eater Lab isn't exciting, but they are being modest! While at C.A.R.L. (Cake Eater Atmospheric Research Laboratory), I watched Kerri change the glass wool in the instrument halogen scrubber, take vertical profiles into the snow with the mass spectrometer, and clean the instrument inlet. We used a SWE (snow water equivalent probe) to bore a two inch diameter hole into the snow pack and put the insulated inlet tube down into the hole! Kerri constructed the insulated tube by nesting the regular teflon tube inside a copper pipe, coating it with heat tape, and making an outer layer of foam. We then used a fancy rigging of string and zip-ties to suspend it at our desired height. :) Measurements were taken at several heights above the snow and into the hole in the snow to investigate halogen activation from the snowpack.

Graduate student Erin Gleason (Univ. of Alaska, Fairbanks) using the SWE probe to make a nice hole in the snow

Excited to be helping out at the Cake Eater Lab! (Graduate student Erin Gleason, Univ. of Alaska, Fairbanks)

Measuring the height of the sampling inlet above the snow (Graduate student Erin Gleason, Univ. of Alaska, Fairbanks)

Thank you Erin for this great post and for helping us out at the lab!