Radiation of lamp and optimized experiment using artificial light in the Arctic Ocean

A winter optical experiment by an artificial lamp was conducted in the Amundsen Bay of Arctic Ocean from November of 2007 to January of 2008. The radiation field emitted from an artificial lamp was measured and is introduced in this paper, and the optimized experiment project is discussed. It is demonstrated that the minimum size allowed of the lamp is determined by both the field of view (FOV) of optical instrument and the measuring distance from the lamp. Some problems that might influence on the experiment result often occur for a simple fluorescent lamp,such as instability, spatial nonuniformity, light divergence, effect of lamp temperature, etc. By the analysis of the light radiation, three kind of measures are proposed to control the quality of the experiment, i.e. keeping consistency of lamp size with FOV of instrument, calibrating in situ downwind, and conducting measurement in effective range. Among them, the downwind calibration is the key step to overcome most problems arose by the lamp. The experiment indicated that the reliable results can be obtained only when the optical measurement is coordinated with the radiation field of artificial lamp. The measured radiation property of the lamp was used to advise the field experiment to minimize measuring error. As the experiment by artificial lamp was the first attempt in the Arctic Ocean, the experience given by this paper is a valuable reference to the correlative studies.