Helping deploy Anita’s instrument to Darjeeling, India

Update: The first publication from Dr. Anita Ganesan’s work in Darjeeling has been published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (view document online).

I’m in my second week in India, where I am helping fellow Prinn-group graduate student Anita Ganesan deploy her gas chromatograph to Darjeeling, a town high on a ridge in West Bengal in the foothills of the Himalayas (Anita has a blog now!). It’s quite a trek to get to the Bose Institute where her instrument will be housed. We spent a few days adjusting to the change in time and culture in the hectic city of Kolkata. A haze hung over the city, making the day seem darker and the nights lighter, and there was a constant smell of burning. It was not unpleasant, but the concerns about the impact of particulate levels on air quality and health that we are taught in the classroom were made real. Two million people in this city and its surroundings breathe this local atmosphere daily, until it is exported to the globe.

We flew above haze spotted by convection clouds yesterday en route to Bagdogra, where we chartered a ride to Darjeeling. The road up through the mountains to Darjeeling was narrow and winding. Anita found the hairpin turns flanked by precipice most stressful because her instrument will make that journey in a delivery truck in just a few days. I was more worried about us, but I do know how it feels to worry about your custom creation being transported on bumpy roads. The cool mountain air was refreshing, but our lungs were aching by the end of the journey after following a chain of cars belching black smoke from their exhaust pipes. Happy to arrive, we entered the Darjeeling campus of Bose Institute in the dark, ready to start work the following day.

On our first full day on the site, Anita showed me around the site. We surveyed the site to decide on the best route for the inlet tubing, which will run from an inlet mounted on a small tower of one building to a different building in which her instrument will be housed. The site operator provided us with a table to support her instrument, and we picked out a spot for it in their instrument room.

Anita has done an incredible amount of work not only on the instrument design and construction but also on developing collaborations to use this site and on the monumental task of shipping everything to this remote site. We hope the instrument will arrive soon.