Today I join that long procession of scientists as I depart
Knoxville for the North Slope of Alaska. It will be a long trip taking 16 hours
and covering 4600 miles as I make my way to Chicago, Anchorage, Fairbanks,
Prudhoe Bay, and eventually Barrow. Hopefully my travels will be uneventful,
although NGEE Arctic scientists have experienced delays in recent weeks largely
due to fog along the coast of the Arctic Ocean. This made landing difficult and
a few of our colleagues spent several days in Anchorage earlier in the month
waiting for conditions to improve. They finally made it to Barrow and many are
there now conducting various measurements in support of the project.
Conditions this year for field measurements have not been
ideal. It has been unusually cold and wet. Air temperatures have been
restricted to the 30's with just a handful of days warming into the 40's. It
snowed as recently as last week. It has also been rainy, with this being the
wettest summer by far in our four years working in Barrow. None of this seems
to slow down our researchers, however, as they have been actively working in
the field since May measuring snowmelt and water table depths; geophysics;
fluxes of energy, CO2, and CH4; components of soil evaporation and
transpiration; spectral reflectance of vegetation; and leaf gas exchange. It
has been a busy year!
I'll provide daily updates for the next 10 days as our
project scientists undertake various research activities at our field sites on
the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO). To the extent possible I'll do my
best to relate those to the objectives of the NGEE Arctic project and to our
goal of improving climate models.
You can expect to hear more from me once I get to Barrow and
join my colleagues...
