28 February 2023

The austral season at Princess Elisabeth has ended and the last team left the station about a week ago. All our instruments foreseen for winter operation are well running. The Brewer ozone spectrophotometer made its last observations of the season on 8 February and is stored now safely inside.  Our institute made a short clip showing our instruments and activities at the station. It can be found on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook:

Facebook NL: https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=1117580542248687

Facebook FR: https://www.facebook.com/www.meteo.be/videos/1310064126242606/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/Comhfv5suW6/

Twitter NL: https://twitter.com/meteobenl/status/1625103540346662913

Twitter FR: https://twitter.com/meteobefr/status/1625103931608104960

6 December 2022

The austral season at Princess Elisabeth has started since a few days. It will mainly be a maintenance season and no personnel from our science projects will be there this time. The team at the station will nevertheless take care of our instrumentation. In particular of interest will be how the instruments at the remote site in the mountains have survived - far away from the station and thus only powered by a small wind turbine, a solar panel and some batteries. We will keep you posted on it.  On the blog mentioned below you can follow more news.

23 May 2022

During this year's conference of the European Geophysical Union in Vienna, there will be several presentations of CLIMB partners: Wex et al on INP results, Sauerland et al on the regional modeling and Van Overmeiren et al on results VOC analyses

08 December 2021

The science team for this season's expedtion to the Belgian Antarctic station is about to leave from Cape Town to Antarctica. Read the reports of Andy and Preben in the section 'Belare 2021-2022 Campaign.

RMI is maintaining a blog where the activities around its polar research can be followed:  blog

16 November 2021

Last week, the first technical team arrived at Princess Elisabeth station Antarctica. They have been busy to put the station back into operational mode. Since yesterday, 15/11/2021, the Brewer ozone spectrophotometer is installed again and can monitor the total ozone amount in the atmospheric column. This year's ozone hole is again very important (see  here). The first measurements of our Brewer instrument revealed values between 131 and 170 DU. These are very low values, but could be expected due to the still lasting ozone hole over the Antarctic continent. 

This season, two of our research colleagues, Preben Van Overmeiren of Ghent University and Andy Delcloo of our institute, will travel to the station. Their planned flight from Cape Town, South Africa, to Antarctica is on 7 December. We will keep you updated on this website on the activities during this season.

26 April 2021

On Friday 23 April, our last cargo arrived :-)  Besides the samples for the CHASE project, also the INP samples arrived safely.  and snow samples. They arrived by sea cargo with a cooled (-25°C) container and we unloaded the container at the ULB. All the samples are now in the freezers of ULB and Ghent University.

10 February 2021

In the meantime, Preben and Alexis are already safe back in Belgium. They managed to do all planned work. Installing the remote mountainous site, recuperating the filter samples from the plateau and from the coast; running the active filter sampling at the station and operating the installed instruments at PEA. Now, we are supervising via remote access the instruments and with the help of the remaining station staff, all is running well.

08 December 2020

Most of the instrumentation is now up and running. The active sampling for organics and inorganics and for ice nuclei particles has been started. The team did also an exploration of the potential sites where to install the mountaineous instrumentation for CLIMB.

03 December 2020

It is now already one week that Princess Elisabeth station is open again. Our scientists Preben and Alexis have installed already several instruments. The Space Aeronomy institute has started twittering on it, see here.