Excitement and some relief today as the British Antarctic Survey aircraft lands in Svalbard for the experiment. The aircraft could not make the flight from mainland Norway yesterday due to low cloud base at Longyearbyen (the only town on Svalbard). There is no alternate airport here and so forecast landing conditions need to be good before making the journey. We have started fitting the instruments ready for a test flight and hopefully the first science flight on Friday. There are several Arctic cyclones right now to the east and southeast of Svalbard and also systems forecast to spin up nearer the Greenland east coast. So some good options to target for science flights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"