Success! We're on the island, our boxes arrived, we set everything up, and now we have collected 1.25 fog water samples! The three of us students have learned the ropes from Dr. Taehyoung Lee, my host professor, and Cheong Min and I are on our own, collecting samples 24 hours per day! We have one fog water collector set up at our originally planned site, at the weather and atmospheric research station on the other end of the island (about a 35 min drive). The other collector has been moved to the dormitory for the station employees, here in Jinchon because we have been getting fog events in the town, but not at the high elevation of the station. We've gotten one large sample (~100 mL) and one smaller sample (~2 mL) from the collector in town, but have not had luck yet with the station collector. As I'm writing this blog entry, I'm at the station (it's 1:28 am on Saturday morning) because the liquid water detector showed fog, but it seems to have dissipated now that we've arrived. The fog events at the station are shorter so far, maybe because the water is lofted with somewhat higher winds to our site, which quickly blow the fog away. Hopefully we'll see some deeper fog before the end of our campaign!
The station has a really nice view from the top deck, where we set up our instruments. On the left in the back is our large fog/cloud water collector, the size fractionated Caltech Active Strand Cloudwater Collector (sf-CASCC). The black spots on the ends are bags, which prevent particles from getting into the collector while it's not operating. Our smaller collector, the CASCC-2 (with only one size fraction) is on the right. In the back you might be able to distinguish a white instrument shaped like an angry crab --that's our liquid water detector, the Particulate Volume Monitor (PVM). The rest of the instrument up here belong to the station, and are permanent installments. It's a pretty well equipped station! The building is run by the Korean National Institute for Environmental Research (NIER), and was established to characterize remote air masses.
To keep all our electrical connections out of the rain, we use multiple ziplock bags and lots of duct tape. I agree that it's probably necessary to keep this from getting wet, but it always makes me cringe a bit to be studying how to improve air and environmental quality, and be generating lots of waste. Somebody please get to work on enzymes that break down specific types of plastics to usable chemical products (not to name any names, Wil)!
I'm also trying something that's not in our fog/cloud water collection protocol: I'm collecting gas-phase carbonyls onto a passive sampler. Hopefully this will give us a handle on the approximate concentrations of possible reactants in the aqueous reactions I'm interested in. My sampler started out as this very simplistic setup, but the flow rate was unfortunately too low and the battery life too short using this little handheld air pump. The NIER scientists and my host advisor have helped me to improve this setup, and we're still working on it.
Here's our sf-CASCC, closer up. The red arrow marks the direction of flow. You can see that inside there are some thick, white Teflon rods to collect larger fog droplets as the fog enters the collector, then Teflon strands to collect the smaller droplets. While this looks at first glance to be a simple setup, this is an extremely efficient collector for this application. The water drains into collector bottles that we then weigh to determine approximate volume of sample collected, and divy out into small vials for chemical analyses. The rest of the sample is frozen for other tests, like my photoreactions that I've been focusing on in my research.
The PVM is certainly more complex, physically: it uses a light source in the IR range (780 nm) to generate measurable light refracted off of liquid water droplets (not vapor) at a particular angle. The resulting value is a liquid water content (LWC) in grams of liquid water per cubic meter of air. It's really nice because we can set it to run overnight, and watch for increased LWC at the station while we're in Jinchon at our motel. In daylight cases, it also helps to determine whether low visibility is due to particles or condensed water, and whether it is thick enough to be fog.
The view from the top of our research station, looking in all directions is really nice ---this is looking west, into some haze (particle-phase pollution, probably with some liquid condensing onto it since it's so humid here and there's lots of water-loving sea salt), which we often see.
This is the CASCC2, the smaller collector. You can see that there's only one "stage", the strands. These strands collect all the fog water pulled through the instrument into the bottle, instead of size-segregating like in our larger sf-CASCC.
Dr. Lee, Cheongmin and Seongweon (Seongweon isn't pictured here) also work with the aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS) at this site, which analyzes particle chemistry with ~minute time resolution: it tells us whether there's sea salt, sulfate, nitrate, and which types of organics in the particles. Their research lab is in charge of maintaining the AMS and PTR-MS instruments at several Korean government research sites. They also have set up a sizing instrument that can measure the number of particles with diameters as low as 5 nm (that's tiny!!).
Here's Cheongmin working with the particle sizing instrument, which is called the nano scanning mobility particle sizer (nanoscan SMPS).
...And again, I can't get enough of the gorgeous sunsets, which are made especially colorful and eerie by the particles in the atmosphere here.
Here's us setting up the CASCC2 at the old tennis courts next to the NIER researchers' dormitories in Jinchon. We used ladders, which is what we could find that was high enough from the ground to be sampling mostly laminar flow, and also was sturdy. The collectors are surprisingly heavy. Dr. Lee (Taehyoung) is on the left, Cheongmin is in the back, and Seongweon is on the right.
Dr. Lee has been very welcoming about my seeing Korea, and has taken us to several nice places on this island. This one is an area of land that's filled with lotus plants. They're not blooming quite yet, but should be very soon. The houses in the background here as well as a store that's not pictured were hand-built by the man who planted the flowers.
We ate "ice flake" together, which is chipped ice, covered in delicious toppings like rice cakes and sweet red beans. There were also sprinkles and cereal.
The food here has been very good ---and although I really enjoy trying new foods and eating healthy (there's hardly any butter and mainly rice for carbs), we've gone out for pizza several times here and it's a real treat! This one is sweet potato pizza. To the left you can see the garlic cream and pickles they serve with pizza here. Although I figured I would need to start eating meat again here, my lab mates have been very kind in helping me to find vegetarian choices everywhere we go. I know that it's a burden to them, but they are very generous and every time I say that it's ok to have some meat, they find me another tasty choice without.
Ok, this is just about the worst transition ---food to nasty critters! This is a HUGE spider I saw on the windowsill (outside, thank goodness) at our motel. Its body is seriously about an inch in diameter, and legs at least another inch. My hand doesn't really allow for judging the size well, but SERIOUSLY! There are lots of bugs here at night, and I've been getting some bites on a regular basis. Haven't seen any mosquitos yet though...
...And back to food! This is probably my favorite dish so far. It's got good flavor, but mostly I appreciate that this so different, local, and subtle. It's a seafood soup, with lots of veggies and noodles. There's squid, shrimp, mussels, and maybe a few other items in there. Really tasty, and other than the noodles, really healthy. I don't usually like a lot of shellfish, but this is really tasty!
Yesterday, I decided to go for a run up to a sort of shrine that's been built to commemorate a folk legend that is said to have taken place on Baengnyeong Island. There's a nice view from the top, looking out into the Yellow Sea. This building is very beautiful, with images from the legend painted into the eaves, and bright colors all over. It's very similar to the buildings we saw in the ancient area of Gyeongju. The legend (as recounted by wikipedia) goes like this: a girl was born, and her mother died at child birth. She took care of her father, was blind, thereafter and was very kind. She heard that some fishermen would return her father's site if she would sacrifice herself to a sea king. She agreed, but the sea king was so moved by her actions that he returned her to life. She was returned within a lotus flower, to the emporer's palace. The emporer fell in love with her and married her, and she held a banquet for all blind men in the area. When her father saw her, he was so surprised he regained his sight. There are pictures and monuments all over the island commemorating this story.
I thought this statue of Cheong, the girl in the legend, was really beautiful.
Here are a couple shots of Jinchon on my way back down the mountain. It's a little touristy, but I have seen almost exclusively locals.
Here are some paintings of the legend, which are scattered throughout the town.
That's all for now! I have lots more time to spend on this island, and there are plenty more sites and places to go running before I can leave here. There will also be many more fog samples to collect! Nothing last night, but fingers crossed for a nice, big volume of fog water tonight!
