Dag Avango tells us more about the Bodman Automatic Weather Station - it is not just plug-and-play.
One of the tasks of the CHAQ2020 expedition at Snow Hill was to establish an automatic weather station (AWS) there. This AWS have two objectives. The first one is to support the ongoing work of preserving the remains of the First Swedish Antarctic Expedition at Sow Hill by providing data on the local climate. The second is to make it possible to compare meteorological data from today with meteorological data from the Nordenskjöld expedition, from almost 120 years ago. For this reason we equipped the AWS with sensors that can measure the same things as the First Swedish Antarctic Expedition – solar radiation, soil temperature, air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and wind direction. In addition, we placed a number of temperature sensors in tubes in the soil at different depths, in order to measure the temperature in the ground, in the active layer and in the permafrost.
The work of putting the weather station in to place was considerable and took almost a year of preparations. The idea came up during a meeting between CHAQ and our Argentinean partners at the Instituto Antártico Argentino (IAA) in April 2019. The Swedish Polar Research Secretariat kindly supported the project by designing the station and covering half of the costs for the hardware. In the autumn of 2019, Niklas Rakos of the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat designed the AWS and bought most of its components. In late November, Niklas trained the CHAQ2020 team in the fine art of putting it all together at the secretariats research station in Abisko in the Swedish Arctic.
Not all pieces were in place though. The battery we had to buy in Argentina because of international flight regulations. And we could not use just any battery. Pablo Fontana had to spend days and nights to get one that would be acceptable to the Argentinean air force as cargo on their Hercules. We also needed a mast to mount the AWS on and got one from the junk yard of the Argentinean Antarctic station Marambio. Because of its considerable size, the mast was impossible to bring on the same helicopter that took us to Snow Hill. The Argentinean air force had to transport in a separate flight, hanging below the helicopter in steel wires.
With the mast on site, we began the work of building the AWS. The first task was to make a hole in the ground deep enough to support the heavy mast. Pablo and myself had picked a hill some 200 meters south of the Nordenskjöld hut for the AWS. As it turned out, this hill had a core of hard ice only some 60 cm below the moraine, which made it an exhausting task of digging and hacking. Once in place, we secured the mast with steel wires to make it withstand even the most severe storms. Mounting the sensors took a lot of adaption of the mast, some of it hard handed, but eventually we managed to successfully connect the sensors with the data logger box, as well as the solar panel and battery power source. With breathless excitement, we turned the AWS on and it worked! Being humanities scholars, we were proud of having successfully built an artefact like this!
The weather station at Snow Hill is now up and running, collecting data that will be of great use for our future planning for the management and preservation of the historical remains at Snow Hill. We named it The Bodman Automatic Weather Station (The Bodman AWS) after Gösta Bodman – a mineralogist born in Norrbotten (Råneå, Luleå municipality) in Arctic Sweden, who was the meteorologist of the Nordenskjöld expedition. We hope the Bodman AWS will represent the beginning of a new era of long term cooperation between Sweden and Argentina, in preserving the historical remains of the First Swedish Antarctic Expedition.
Pablo Fontana mounting sensors on the top of the mast. Photo: Dag Avango
Dag Avango and Jonathan Westin mounting the temperature and air humidity sensor. Photo: Kati Lindström
Kati Lindström connecting sensors to the data loggers of the Bordman AWS. Photo: Dag Avango
The Bodman AWS in place at Cerro Nevado / Snow Hill island. Photo: Kati Lindström
Manuel Mamani digging through the ice to make a mast hole for the Bodman AWS. Photo: Dag Avango
