Thursday, September 07, 2006

US Navy Aerial Photo of Patriot Hills: Facing Northwest



Patriot Hills is the small set of hills in on the right. The katabatic winds come whipping down from the 9,000' elevation at the Pole (left to right in the photo) and blow the snow off the ice on the downwind side, creating one of two "blue ice" runways in Antarctica.
This one is 7,500 feet long by about 160 feet wide, enabling it to handle craft as large as the chartered Ilyushin 76 jet that arrives weekly (weather permitting). The jets are flown on their ten-hour round-trip journey by Russian crews with whom I will be speaking enroute from Chile via HF (Shortwave) and Iridium satphone.
What makes it complicated is that the katabatic winds blow perpendicular to the runway and Ilyushins, with their big tails, do not cotton to crosswinds above 18 knots, so the key decision is the "go or no-go" one that must be made before the plane departs Chile. Patriot Hills has a full-time meteorologist on staff who will sit in the same hut as I. He will rely on various sources of weather information, including automated weather stations set up by Stanford University a hundred miles or so upwind towards the Pole.

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