Every time I call my mom she asks me about the weather. So, I guess people are quite interested in that. Truth be told, I usually just make up a number. Most of the time I honestly don’t care. During the winter it is dark, cold, and maybe windy. Not much change. I have to go out to the telescope no matter what and there is really not much of a point in keeping up with the current weather.

Until this year the Antarctic Program had a forecaster sitting in McMurdo who would come up with a weather forecast for the next two days. Somehow this changed this year. The forecast is now made by some military person in one of the Carolinas. Initially it did have some entertainment value because it was mostly wrong. At some point most of us stopped caring and the forecast in the galley just read “Mostly dark, pretty cold, breezy” for most of the winter.

I added a little panel with the current South Pole weather to the sidebar on the right, for those of you who care. During the winter the Station meteorologists send out an observation report every six hours. The data doesn’t get any more current, no matter what other web sites make you believe. The observation frequency increases to once an hour during the summer (the flying season, to be exact).

The weather hasn’t been all that great around sunrise. Today it cleared for a few hours, just as I was walking back to the Station. Enough time to take a few shots.

Click on an image to launch the gallery (5 pictures)