Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Another Season Nearly Complete for NGEE Arctic Tram…



Bryan Curtis (LBNL) told me earlier this week that, according to plan, the NGEE Arctic tram has performed admirably since it went operational in May, 2015. The automated cart has made hundreds of trips down the 65 meter track, once every 3 hours in fact, around the clock. During that time a suite of sensors have monitored albedo, NDVI, and multiple components of the surface energy balance as snow melted in the spring, low-lying area became inundated with water, vegetation grew throughout the summer and senesced in autumn, and then the onset of snow this winter. Throughout this time additional measurements of soil temperature and moisture, chamber-based and eddy covariance CO2 and CH4 flux, active layer thickness, geophysics, and phenology were made either along the tram or within the tram footprint. The co-location of so many high-resolution measurements, once analyzed together, should yield an unprecedented dataset to inform scaling and modeling. The NGEE Arctic team anticipates letting the tram operate for another few weeks and then disassembling the system in early November.