I came across a curious looking instrument on my walk up to the  Point yesterday and did some investigating to find out what it is.  It turns out to be a cloud height measurer.

The instrument like many others had a connection coming back to Old Bransfield House.

The aircraft meteorology observations require cloud height measurements. This is quite an art requiring an experienced observer.  At Rothera the cloud heights are provided through visual observations by the Met babes. They do however have this clever instrument to help them.

This instrument fires a beam into the sky and determines the height of the of the base of the cloud be the time recording the time for the signal to bounce back.

This is displayed on a terminal in the  Met Office and observers can VNC connect to the server to view the display from anywhere on station.