Science Never Sleeps

It's Sunday morning. I'm duty weather girl.

The majority of base members might be enjoying a lie in, but science never sleeps.

There are three of us in the Halley met team and we take turns to work the weekend shifts.

As I make my way to work at nine, there's already a glow over the misty horizon.

There's just one week to go until sun up.


After entering my 9am weather observation into the computer which sends it straight to the UK met office, I take my place in the Halley met office.

It looks so similar to any old office back home, if I wasn't going outside every hour I could easily forget I was 12000 miles away.

The friendly office penguin sits over my desk, alongside photos of green, sunny, hilly places to help me remember that it's not flat and white everywhere.

At about half ten get dressed up again and make for BART, a shipping container on stilts, to fill the daily weather balloon with helium gas ready for launch.

When it's full, the balloon's about the same size as me (height not width, even Ant's amazing food hasn't done me that much damage, not yet at least!). I tie a radiosonde onto the neck of the balloon before releasing it. That's a little plastic box carrying temperature, pressure and humidity sensors and a GPS antenna (you can work out wind speed and direction if you know how the positions changes with height), which hangs on a long string beneath the balloon and transmits data back our receivers every second.

The balloon can travel up to 25km and expand to the size of a double decker bus before bursting!


On my way back to the office after lunch the light was as bright as a bedside lamp with a hangover. The morning mist had cleared and the daylight totally caught me by surprise. The past few weeks went something like this: it was dark all the time, then a few days of blizzard, then suddenly the skies cleared and we got days back again! I mean, I still had to use night mode on my camera to take this photo, the light only lasts a couple of hours and it's probably still dark enough to turn street lights on back home, but after three months it comes as a welcome change, that's for sure.