Welcome to Nome

Posted by Sam Wright on behalf of Susan Hubbard

The majority of the NGEE team flew this morning from Anchorage to Nome,  Alaska. Nome is located on the Seward Peninsula, about 75 miles from the town of Council, where the NGEE team is considering developing one of two field study sites. Compared to the Barrow study site (which the team will visit later this week), the Council region is warmer and the permafrost is thinner.  A study site in this region will allow us to examine ecosystem-climate feedbacks associated with a transitional landscape where the permafrost is discontinuous and the expansion of shrubs to tundra is already occurring. Stan and Larry, who had arrived in Nome the day before, met us at the airport with vehicles.  We arrived to a beautiful day – bright blue sky and warmer temperatures than many of the summer days I experience in Berkeley.  It was an auspicious start to our weeklong site selection venture!

Our main activity today was a meeting with several of the Nome community leaders. Larry had arranged the meeting, and he initiated the discussion by describing the NGEE project to the leaders and then asking for their feedback.  Four hours of very interesting conversation followed.  The leaders asked excellent questions and offered assistance in terms of data, introductions, and community outreach. They thought our key scientific question - of how permafrost degradation impacts water distribution, nitrogen allocation, organic carbon decomposition and energy balance - was indeed worthy of study. Most importantly, listening to them provided really valuable insights about how climate change and the coupled processes that we plan to study can really impact a community. We heard accounts of how the landscape, flora and fauna had changed since the days that they or their parents were younger. They told us how Felt Leaf Willow and Cottonwood, which grow well in thawed soils, has become much more pervasive in their landscape.  Terrain that ‘used to be smooth when I was young is now humpty-dumpty’, which referred to the microtopograhy created through thermokarsting.  We heard about changes in the fish species, how moose had replaced caribou within their lifetime, and how areas that once yielded salmonberries now yield blueberries. With a population that includes large mammal hunters, reindeer herders, and fisherman, it is clear that these changes have impacted the livelihood of the town members. These changes also have feedbacks to the processes that we are intending to study in ways that we had not considered.  For example, beavers, which very have recently become much more common in the area due to warming, are building dams that are altering surface water flows.  Although we had envisioned choosing our study plots within the Council site based primarily on geomorphology (i.e., pre-, active- and post- permafrost degradation), it was clear through these conversations that there are many other factors that could indicate the state of the landscape transition, and we discussed different avenues for soliciting this deep local ecological knowledge for use within NGEE.

We wrapped up our meeting by talking with logistical providers who had also joined the meeting, and looking at maps and areal images of the different areas around Council that we will visit tomorrow.  We are all excited about getting out to the field - it is bound to be an interesting day in this fascinating region!

8/15/11 - Great Day in Nome!

Today was an absolutely perfect day in Nome. Temperatures were mild, the sun was out, and there not a cloud in the sky. Local residents said this weather was long overdue as it has rained much of the last 6 weeks.

Larry, Bob, and I picked up our colleagues at the airport. After weeks of planning it was great to have everyone in one location. We checked people into the hotel, had a quick bite to eat, and then back to the hotel for our conference with local community leaders. It was an outstanding meeting; especially as people grew more and more comfortable talking about their various perspectives on environmental change and issues that concerned people of Nome, Council, and White Mountain areas of the Seward Peninsula. There is a great deal of traditional knowledge regarding how the landscape has changed over the years. We talked fairly extensively about how this knowledge could be tapped to provide a rich history of insights that could complement scientific inquiry. There was strong support for how some aspect of this could constitute an educational and outreach activity that would engage residents through the region. We left the meeting with several action items.

Tuesday we head off to Council for the day where we will visit several established research projects in the area. Most of these are addressing some aspect of permafrost degradation which is, of course, a major interest of our NGEE project. We will see first-hand sites where Larry and his UAF colleagues have worked before and have the opportunity to consider whether these are sites that we could also use as part of the NGEE project.

Enjoyed Anchorage, Now off to Nome

Posted by Sam Wright on behalf of Stan Wullschleger
 
It was a long day getting to Anchorage, but arrived at the Ted Stevens International Airport late on Saturday afternoon. Checked into hotel and decided to go for an evening run on the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail. Twenty hours of daylight makes this an easy decision. The Coastal Trail goes along the Knik Arm of the Cook Inlet for 10 miles or more to the west of Anchorage. I was impressed by the scenery and by the number of people out enjoying the trail.

Left the hotel early Sunday morning with plenty of time to check-in for the flight to Nome and get through security. On the way to the airport the shuttle dropped off a party of hunters at Lake Hood. There are hundreds of seaplanes around the perimeter of this lake. I was told that 1 in 30 residents of Anchorage have a pilots license. My son, Kevin, is a pilot and currently training to be an air traffic controller. He and his buddies in Oklahoma City would enjoy this aspect of the Anchorage area.

I met Larry Hinzman at the airport, along with Bob Busey also from UAF, and we traveled together to Nome. Its a 90 minute flight in an Alaska Airlines 737 Combi. The cabin area of these planes is divided to carry cargo in the front  and passengers in the back. Nome can only be reached by barge or plane, and thus the airlines take every opportunity to transport people and supplies to this coastal town.

We spent much of the day in Nome visiting the handful of hardware stores and checking on the availability of general supplies needed for field research. Bob has a lot of practical experience working in the area and knows his way around. We drove out of town to the top of Anvil Mountain. Anvil Mountain was a military radar site at one time; now it provides a good location for the deployment of communication towers. Bob, Larry, and others from UAF maintain a repeater at this site along with a weather station. The repeater allows data from several sites to be gathered remotely using telemetry and then downloaded to a web-accessible site at the university in Fairbanks. From there, data can be processed and shared among project participants and with the larger scientific community. This capability will be an asset for any research site we might establish on the Seward Peninsula as part of the NGEE project.

Tonight Larry, Bob, and I will have dinner with a colleague of Larry's who lives in Nome. This will be a good opportunity to learn more about the area and to discuss our plans to potentially conduct at least a portion of our research near Council. Council is located about 1.5 hours drive northeast of Nome and has been the site of several successful research campaigns including ATLAS. Council lies at a zone of transition (i.e., ecotone) between boreal forests, shrub lands, and tundra. It is a hotspot for rapid changes in permafrost stability, surface hydrology, and vegetation dynamics. The rest of our team arrives tomorrow and we will visit this site on Tuesday.

As for Monday we meet with representatives of CH2MHill Polar Services to discuss logistical support at Council and then have an afternoon meeting planned with local community leaders and representatives of several state and federal agencies. We have prepared to short presentation on the NGEE project. It should be a good day and we look forward to receiving constructive feedback on our plans.

A Grid Cell Outside My Window

Posted by Sam Wright on behalf of Stan Wullschleger

Today I am flying to Anchorage where I will stay the night before departing for the Seward Peninsula and Nome on Sunday morning. My plan is to join Larry Hinzman, Director of the UAF International Arctic Research Center (IARC) for discussions with local leaders who are interested in the status of our NGEE project. Other members of our team will arrive on Monday.

Our plane left the Seattle/Tacoma airport 15 minutes ago and the pilot just announced that we had reached our cruising altitude of 30,000 feet. Looking out the window, and resisting the temptation to fall asleep, I am reminded that climate models include land surface components that are parameterized at a scale similar to the landscape that stretches out below me. A grid cell depicts the spatial resolution of a climate model and is frequently measured in hundreds of square kilometers. At this scale it is possible to distinguish only broad characteristics of ecosystems. The structural and functional diversity that I know is present within these ecosystems when viewed on the ground, is seen as only different shades of green from this altitude. That becomes a problem when we try to represent critical processes that are important but must do so at scales far larger than those at which ecology, hydrology, plant and energy dynamics, and biogeochemical cycles play out on the landscape. High-resolution models where the grid cell is much smaller in size than that used in today's models are needed if we are to adequately represent this surface and subsurface complexity in climate models. Peter Thornton, a scientist at ORNL and a member of our NGEE team, emphasized this in a presentation last week. He indicated that high-resolution, process-rich models can help integrate results from field and lab research into climate models where the goal is to improve predictions at regional and global scales. While clearly an ambitious undertaking, we envision that the NGEE project with its combination of field observations, lab experiments, and process modeling can ultimately provide this high-resolution simulation capability for Arctic landscapes. It will be an exciting week as our team considers this goal while seeing first-hand the complexity of ecosystems across Alaska.

This weekend a team of scientists from several Department of Energy (DOE) national labs and the University of Alaska Fairbanks will travel to Anchorage and then to Nome, Council, and Barrow, Alaska. Our goal is to gain an appreciation for the diversity of terrestrial ecosystems that stretch across the landscape from the boreal forests and shrub lands of the Seward Peninsula to the high-Arctic tundra of the North Slope. These ice-rich and permafrost-dominated ecosystems are sensitive to environmental change, especially warming, and this trip will provide our team a great opportunity to see how climate, permafrost, hydrology, and ecology interact to shape these complex systems. Our interests lie in how climate change may impact carbon and energy cycles associated with warmer temperatures, permafrost degradation, and vegetation dynamics. Gaining a first-hand appreciation for Arctic landscapes during this trip will help us refine our research questions and identify potential field sites for the NGEE project. It will be at these sites that our multi-disciplinary team will collect data required to better understand chemical, physical, and biological processes that underlie important ecosystem-climate feedbacks and how to represent those in climate models. Models must couple process-level knowledge with rapid evolution of the Arctic landscape due to permafrost degradation if we are to predict the consequences for regional and global climate. This is an exciting but daunting task. During our trip we also look forward to sharing our plans with community leaders and listening to their thoughts. Local citizens understand and in many instances can document changes that have occurred in the lands surrounding their communities. This can benefit and inform our science and aid in understanding the challenges likely to be faced by our team as we seek to work safely and productively in remote locations of Alaska.