HELLO TRONDNHEIM

The lights in town are coming on as the sun is rapidly lowering on the horizon.  On the left is the power plant stack, with the airport in the background and the docks busy offloading cargo in the foreground.

The week started like a normal week with kids getting ready for school and then off to Norwegian class with Nicole.  After learning some new sounds and the words to describe the weather and the family (mother, brother and so on), I headed to UNIS.  I touched base with a few colleagues on the REMUS work while they were on the cruise.  The goal is to map the area around a mooring (a string of automated instruments on a vertical line in the ocean) with the REMUS so that we can characterize the best location.  I will obtain the data and then send it to them on the ship and we will install the mooring on the last 2 days of the cruise.  At least that is the plan!
 

Looking out over the fjord in Tromsø

Looking back at Tromsø on the way to Bodø.

I then got a ride to the airport (always nice not having to take the bus!) and caught a flight to Trondheim.  We are now down to one flight a day (no Saturday flights), which arrives at about 1400 and leaves an hour later. There are also no direct flights to Oslo, so all flights are routed through Tromsø.  I had a three hour stop-over, so I was able to get out of the airport and walk around a bit.  It had been cloudy and rainy since leaving for Stavanger the previous week, so walking in the sun was a good thing.   We then flew to Bodø watching the sun set and after 40 minutes on the ground headed for Trondheim.  I caught the bus into town and arrived at my hotel at about 2200.  I stayed in a hotel on the main river though town, elv Nidelva, which had opened only 4 weeks ago…very nice. 

A view of Trondheim looking up the Nidelva River.  The colorful houses used to be warehouses for fish and commercial traffic in and out of the Trondsheimfjorden.  In the background is Nidarosdomen, dates to 1000 and burial place of Viking Kings and St. Olav.

The next day, I went to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and met some colleagues and talked about new marine initiatives in Norway. That night everyone had something to do, so I was on my own.  It was good to relax a bit ad catch up on some papers that I am writing.  The next day I gave a talk on nested technology approaches in addressing scale in the ocean to a group from Statoil (the national oil company) and NTNU.  The basic idea is that the ocean is dynamic and depending on the process of interest operates on varying time and space scales.  How to optimize sampling to address these processes (i.e. fisheries, pollution etc.) is a difficult problem and approaching this with a set of platforms (i.e. AUVs, moorings, and ships) instead of just ships for example is a better way to do that.  I showed some applications of this approach and generally got a good reception.  Then I was off to NTNU’s biological station, a beautiful renovated historic building on Trondheimsfjorden overlooking Trondheim. That night I had pizza with a colleague and his family before heading back to the hotel. 

Above: Infront of NTNU's Biological Station which was established in 1900, three year's before Scripps Institution of Oceanography and 30 years before Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.  Below: On the peir of the station with Trondheim in the background.

On Thursday, I went to visit the Department of Nature management.  They are interested in a summary of underwater techniques to map and monitor seafloor habitats and organisms and I talked about the different approaches with optical and acoustical instrumentation.  After some additional work at NTNU, I headed to the hotel before going out for dinner.  Dinner ran late that night (0130), so getting up at 0430 was a bit brutal.  The flight back was a reversal of the way here and I slept most of the trip back. 

On arrival, I stopped by UNIS and touched base with the leader of an undergraduate class that I will be teaching next week to coordinate plans.  Then it was home… yes… it feels like home now, took a nap for a couple of hours and then we went to our friends house for dinner.  We filled ourselves on Tacos, had some good conversation and played a US versus Norway match in Wii.  The kids had a great time and it was good to be back with the family.

The mountains get a powdering as the temperature begins to plummet. 

This weekend was beautiful with a rare cloudless day on Saturday and mostly sunny on Sunday.  The temperatures have noticeably dropped and are now hovering around freezing. Unfortunately, I had to use most of Saturday revising a science manuscript (due Monday), but I got it done!  Today, I went to UNIS to finish up my lecture for tomorrow. Home for lunch and then went to the gym with the family.  Nicole and the boys went swimming while I played basketball.  I was asked to coach the team, so after shooting around a bit, I started on some of the basics.  It is an enthusiastic group with little experience, but I think we can get somewhere.  We have a game with the Russian coal mining settlement, Barentsburg, next week, so it should be interesting.  I am writing this now before heading to football tonight and then start another busy week… Looking forward to being in Longyearbyen for a while. Time is flying by!

Picture of the week: The low sun fills the sky with orange and reflects off Adventdalen's river.