In Deep...

The trip was on. We received permission last week to land the helicopter at the NGEE Teller and Council sites for snow surveys and the helicopter and pilot were lined up, approved, and ready to fly. Bob Bolton, Bob Busey and I were greeted by our Nome logistics helper, Crystal Anderson-Booth, who helped gather and deliver the many action packers full of gear needed for our work. We spent Sunday organizing and testing equipment, including the new commercial SP2 digital snow hardness probe and Bob Busey’s prototype laser snow probe. We packed our survival bags with food for 3 days, sleeping bags, tents and other essentials that would be required if we were stranded in the field, a long shot.

On Monday morning we dropped our gear to be weighed and loaded on the helicopter, then waited until noon for freezing rain to clear so the helicopter could fly without danger of icing.  Using the great geopdf maps created by Lauren Charsley-Groffman and Garrett Altmann, we guided the pilot to the watershed and positioned ourselves at the first of 39 snow survey sites. We offloaded a belly pod and cabin full of gear, made another round trip for more gear, and then got to work. 

The first task on our list was to test out the new SP2 probe. Bob Bolton and I were having trouble getting it through an icy layer in the snowpack, so Bob Busey offered to show us how to use our “inner chi” to smoothly insert the probe. He described the process of centering oneself, then demonstrated the proper stance and with great ease inserted the probe to its maximum depth. Shortly after the probe completed its data cycle, he extracted it from the snow. We were quite impressed! Until I noticed the lower third of the probed was missing and thin broken wires that were hanging out of the end.  So much for Bob’s Chi, and the new SP2…

 …While Bob Busey skied off with the DGPS to survey snow surface elevation, Bob Bolton and I began the snow depth and snow water equivalent survey using standard instruments. With the first snow depth transect we knew we were IN  DEEP. Vladimir had reported a 20- 50cm snow pack at Pilgrim Hot Springs, but the snow depth at our first Teller site was 1.5m, which required shoulder deep (literally) pits (10 per site) for each of the snow density measurements. 

 

Luckily, our next two sites had somewhat shallower and less dense snow. We noticed that the snow was particularly light, loose and sugary in the shrub thickets within the channel. Unfortunately we only managed to complete 2.5 sites on our first afternoon in the field, far short of the 4 sites per half day that we expected to accomplish. 

 

Tuesday we woke to brilliant clear skis and were out at the field site by 9am. The plan was to work our way downhill across our survey grid. The pilot dropped me at the ridge with a load of equipment and as the helicopter took off to shuttle the Bobs to the top, I was stunned by the otherworldly beauty of the landscape and the perfect weather conditions. 

 

While Bob Busey set up the second GPS base station, Bob Bolton and I completed the suite of snow measurements at 2 more sites. As we made our way over to the third location we noticed a thin fog bank moving in our direction, and alerted the pilot in Nome of the change in the weather. Within the hour, the fog was upon us, and Bob Busey said it was time to leave the field because helicopters can’t land if they can’t see the ground. We didn’t want to get stranded, so we implemented our safety protocol which included a satellite tracker text message of our coordinates to the pilot, pilot confirmation that he was on his way, stowing non-essential gear in action packers to be left behind, collecting survival packs, turning on Cathy’s satellite telephone and hunkering down for the pilot’s arrival.

 Before long we heard the helicopter’s approach… then it was right overhead, but we couldn’t see it … then it flew off into the distance and was gone. At that point the second part of the safety plan kicked into gear. The pilot called to tell us where he landed and we set off to meet him at a new rendezvous point. As we moved off the ridge to meet the pilot, we were immersed in the increased complexity of working at a somewhat more remote field site than Barrow. But we were grateful to be well prepared for an emergency, and that Bob Busey was experienced in assessing the weather condition before it was too late to evacuate. Our caution made the difference between sleeping at the Dredge7 last night or being stuck in a cold tent on a hillside for 2 days. We woke up this morning to hot coffee and grounded aircraft due to freezing fog. It’s 4pm and still no take off or landing.

NASA ABoVE Hosts Second Science Team Meeting in Anchorage

Members of the NASA-sponsored Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) travelled this week to Anchorage, Alaska to host the second of its Science Team meetings. ABoVE (http://above.nasa.gov/) is a large-scale study of environmental change and its implications for social-ecological systems. It selected 21 projects last fall with a diversity of field, remote sensing, and modeling studies slated to begin this year in Alaska and western Canada.

NGEE Arctic is a core project in the ABoVE field campaign. Last November, at their first Science Team meeting in Minnesota, there was great interaction among the project participants. Working groups were formed to ensure integration across the various projects. NGEE Arctic is contributing to several working groups including the Hydrology and Permafrost Working Group led by John Kimball. We are currently in the process of developing an implementation plan that describes how the various field activities will be coordinated to achieve goals of the ABoVE project. This involves discussions of field sites, measurements to be taken, modeling activities, and data sets and derived-products to be developed. The NGEE Arctic project is quite interested in helping to define the airborne remote sensing needs of ABoVE as our project needs these products in order to effectively implement our scaling strategy for global climate models.

While the meeting in Minnesota was to coordinate PIs funded through ABoVE, the Science Team meeting in Anchorage is designed to bring together the many stakeholders in Alaska and Canada who share a common interest in climate change, ecosystem services, resource management, and interactions between social and ecological systems. We have heard a number of excellent presentations in the last two days, mostly from representatives of state and federal agencies, and native organizations. It has been helpful to learn about all the relevant research being conducted throughout the Arctic-boreal region, and to consider how those data-rich resources, including traditional knowledge, can be brought to bear on topics of interest to ABoVE. Presentations from native communities have been especially interesting as they bring a unique perspective to the topic of climate change given their close association with the environment.

Our plan in the NGEE Arctic project is to continue our interaction with NASA and share information derived from our studies on the North Slope and Seward Peninsula with others on the ABoVE Science Team. Our sponsors at the Department of Energy, Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program are highly supportive of this inter-agency collaboration. We share many goals and objectives with ABoVE, and it is clear that we have the opportunity to develop strong and complementary interactions in the coming years.

 

  

 

Another Year Comes to a Close…

It has been a great year for the NGEE Arctic team. We travelled to the Seward Peninsula in western Alaska and selected a set of southern field sites for 2016; we were reviewed by our sponsors at the Department of Energy and approved for another three years of field, laboratory, and modeling studies; and as of this week we closed down much of the field research in Barrow, Alaska.

I flew into Anchorage last Monday and enjoyed the winter scenery from my window, before making the additional 3 hour flight north to Barrow. Bryan and Alex, both from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory joined me on Tuesday. Knowing that we would have limited daylight and possible cold temperatures we allocated 5 days to disassembling the NGEE Arctic tram and transporting other instruments back to Barrow for winter storage.

The bulk of our time was spent taking down the tram which consisted of removing the instrumented cart along with 65 meters of rail and supporting posts. Because of its design the tram was quickly disassembled and, once secured on sleds, everything was transported back to storage facilities in Barrow. We did the same for instruments on the eddy covariance tower, the geophysical ERT array, and then miscellaneous bits and pieces of equipment that we have in the field. This included several solar panels that we use during the field season to trickle-charge batteries used in the micro-warming experiment.

An extra day was spent working with Bob Busey back in Fairbanks to measure data transmission rates from various locations on the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO) back to computers at the Barrow Arctic Research Center (BARC). Every year we find ourselves transmitting more and more data and we want to be sure that we are being efficient in getting data from the field to investigators at our partner institutions in New York, Nebraska, and California. We will analyze transmission rates in the weeks to come and make decisions as to whether we should upgrade wireless capabilities at our field sites in the spring.

For now, 2015 comes to a close. I expect to return to Barrow in January or February and then the larger team will probably return in April or early May to reinstall the tram and other instruments. Those activities will mark the beginning of our fifth year of research in the Arctic.