The Paspartout project has been present at Princess Elisabeth Station during Belare 2024-2025. Our team member Paula Lamprea of Ghent University has been at the station from 11 January to 14 February 2025. She managed to complete all tasks. Below there is a short report by her on this work. This Belare season was very successful. Besides the work near the coast, she re-installed the total particle number concentration counter at the station. This instrument is very sensitive and can measure also very very low particle numbers, but also high concentrations. It gives a good view on atmospheric processes going on. Our Brewer ozone spectrophotometer has also been re-installed and maintained. This season has seen no exceptionally large ozone hole (luckily). But because fhe future evolution of stratospheric ozone remains uncertain, ground-based ozone reference measurements like the ones at the station, will continue to be essential for evaluating the impacts of the Montreal Protocol, climate change, and related shifts in atmospheric chemistry, such as those caused by major wildfires. Another important step forward has been that the station operator acquired an hydrogen generator. The hydrogen produced by wind and solar energy has been used for filling the meteorological balloons for radio soundings. This self-produced hydrogen will replace the helium used up to now and it replaces also the costly and heavy shipping of the helium bottles.
Paula's short report :-)
The Belgian Research Expedition (BELARE) 2024-2025 is coming to an end, and so are my research duties in East Antarctica!
In December 2023, I joined the PASPARTOUT project, a research project funded by the Belgian Science Policy Office and coordinated by the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium (KMI-IRM-RMI), in collaboration with Ghent University, the Université Libre de Bruxelles and KU Leuven.
The PASPARTOUT project aims to gain an in-depth understanding of the links between atmospheric circulation patterns, weather regimes, particles, volatile organic compounds, and moisture, as well as their implications and changes within a changing global climate.
This season, my tasks included a 5-day field trip near the East Coast to sample snow from 2 snow trenches, maintain an automatic snow sampler that collects snow samples autonomously throughout the year, and install an automatic air sampler that takes weekly samples of organic compounds in the atmosphere. Additionally, I retrieved the air samples collected during the previous BELARE season (2023-2024) and assisted with the annual maintenance of instrumentation at the atmospheric observatory at Princess Elisabeth Antarctica. This observatory houses instruments for aerosol, cloud, and precipitation measurements, as well as total ozone and UV radiation monitoring.
A big thank you to the International Polar Foundation (IPF) for organizing the expedition, both before and during my stay, to Alexander Mangold for coordinating the project, and to all project partners (Christophe Walgraeve; Nadine Mattielli; Nicole Van Lipzig; Andy Delcloo; Sibylle Boxho; Sarah Wauthy and Florian Sauerland) for their invaluable support!
