Data, data, and more data

Wednesday, March 24: High: 8F Low: -8F

I get up around noon, take a shower, and get to the mess hall just before it closes. Again the CRESIS team is flying a local flight and I'm now just waiting for the data to come back so I can start working. This really is a second/third shift job beginning around 4pm and going until 3am. I'm seriously getting some comp time when I get home.

While waiting for the flight to return, one of the NASA crew complains about not being able to watch the plane tracks on Google Earth because he can't connect to the server back at home base in California. Our mission commander claims it's a problem at the base in California, and the California base blames us. The crew asks me to look into it. I do a couple of traceroutes and discover that I can access the site in question from my workstation at Indiana University, but I can't access it from Thule. But in both cases I can get to a NASA router. So a quick look in the whois database, and I get a number for the NASA NOC. A young gentleman by the name of Sedrick answers the phone and I send him my traces. He says he'll look into it. Well, it ends up not being a NOC issue, but with Sedrick's help, we are able to get the California base to take the issue seriously. Eventually they "discover" that indeed the California base is blocking our IP range. Why, I'm not sure. But I hand the phone to the safety officer who tells the Californians that we need to see the real-time flight data because there are 40 people on board an airplane in the middle of *Greenland* for heaven's sake with very few populated areas around. That real-time data may be the only way we know that the plane has crashed and also *where* it crashed if it does. A little more arm twisting later, and the Californians agree to open the firewall to us. You would think one base wouldn't block another. It must be an international thing. Chalk up more brownie points for me!

The flight returns and the CRESIS team hands me about 4.5 TB of data to back up. I begin the eleven hour process of copying the data. I'm still running into some disk failure problems, but I'm able to get done what I need to get done. Also, it looks like most of the drive failures are in one particular case. I'm betting that case got manhandled at some point by someone who was angry about all the equipment we brought to Greenland.

During the daily crew briefing, we're told that the wind is going to pick up tomorrow. This means we cannot fly. Also it means that we need to be aware of the weather condition. They encourage us to check out the cold weather gear offered by the base. In fact, the gear is required if we want to leave the base tomorrow. I guess you wouldn't want to be caught outside in Greenland with no snow pants. Or something like that.

I'm glad tomorrow's a no fly day. It'll be good to have a day to get things in order.