LANL Synoptic Survey Team July 8th-17th, 2013

The LANL team (Jeff Heikoop, Heather Throckmorton, Garrett Altmann, Lily Cohen and Michael Hudak) continues its synoptic survey of water isotopes and chemistry to understand hydrologic pathways and transport in the BEO and surroundings.  This year, our focus has shifted from the polygon scale to larger drainage systems with particular emphasis on outlets from interlake areas and different aged drain thaw lake basins.  We are taking samples from surface water, the uppermost part of the active layer (0-4” from surface), and the active layer at the frost table (~11-16”) at 15 locations.  Sampling at the frost table has proven particularly difficult so we have employed arrays of rhizons to obtain sufficient water while minimizing disturbance (rhizons make a hole only about a finger’s width wide and can be removed immediately after sampling) (Photo 1).  The team also got to try out a system for filtering water samples through syringe filters (as small as 0.2 microns) aided by an electric caulking gun.  This has saved us hours of tedious and tiresome effort.  Our thanks to Marvin Gard whose ingenuity continues to amaze us!

The team is also testing Iron Reduction in Sediment (IRIS) probes to see if these might be a simple and cost-effective way to monitor redox changes on the broader landscape when collection of subsurface water samples may not be practical.  These probes consist of PVC coated with a ferrihydrite paint (photo 2).  Under reducing conditions iron on these probes will partially dissolve.  The amount of dissolution can be quantified by image analysis and related in a semi-quantitative fashion to redox conditions in the sediment.  IRIS probes have been approved by the EPA for demonstrating the presence of reducing soils for wetlands delineation. We are deploying these probes adjacent to our rhizon arrays so that we can compare out chemical results (a snapshot in time) to the time integrated signals provided by the IRIS probes, which will be pulled in September.  Image analysis will employ LANL’s GENIE technology.

In addition to synoptic survey activities, Liz Miller of LANL has also joined the team to perform a high-resolution differential GPS survey of troughs and flooded low-centered polygons to fill in gaps in LIDAR data.  This data will provide sub-centimeter elevation profiles for improved hydrologic modeling of the site (photo 3).

After rigorous days in the field, field team leader Heikoop was particularly impressed that his younger colleagues decided rooms in the Herman House should be segregated based on age with no doubt as to which room he belonged.  He also wants to thank Cathy Wilson for arranging to have high caliber athletes, including a champion ironwoman and world-class skier on the trip for him to keep pace with.  Fortunately everyone has provided plenty of calorie replenishment back home at ‘camp’ with their array of culinary talents. 

Photo 1: Rhizon array in ancient DTLB.

Photo 2: Mike Hudak holding IRIS probes prior to deployment in a young DTLB to the south of the BEO.

Photo 3: Liz Miller performing high-resolution GPS surveying.

 

Pic of the trip...

The NGEE Arctic team takes a lot of pictures during their stay in Barrow. Most relate to their science, but a few simply reflect the unique nature of life on the North Slope of Alaska. While I certainly do not see all pictures taken by people when in Barrow, I do see enough to post my favorite ones from this past trip.

The first "pic of the trip" was taken by Lily Cohen. Lily is from LANL and snapped this picture of jelly fish one evening as she walked along the Arctic Ocean just a short distance from our Herman House apartment.

 

The second "pic of the trip" was taken by Garrett Altmann. Garrett is also from LANL and took this mushroom picture one afternoon while collecting water samples from a drained thaw lake basin south of Barrow.

 

My thanks to Lily and Garrett for capturing these great images of the Arctic.

 

NASA program staff come to Barrow...

This past week was a productive one for our NGEE Arctic team in Barrow. July is a busy month for us with more than 20 scientists, staff, and students working at our field sites on the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO) and to the south across a series of drained thaw lake basins. The weather was good early in the week, but it turned foggy with a light rain especially in the last few days. As the winds died down and air temperatures rose, the mosquitoes came out with a vengeance. Deet and bug jackets were definitely required if you were going to make working in the field bearable.

Although the weather could have been better, this was the week that several NASA program office staff would visit Barrow. I picked up Peter, Dan, Libby, and Leanne, as well as University of Maryland professor Eric Kasischke from the airport on Monday morning. They had traveled to Barrow in order to familiarize themselves with tundra ecosystems of the North Slope of Alaska. They also wanted to see first hand the many scientific facilities in town and to visit with UMIAQ, the logistical provider who supports our NGEE Arctic project.

We spent two days touring the Department of Energy, Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) climate research facility; the NOAA CMDL facility; the Barrow Arctic Research Center; and the BEO where we and others have field research sites. This gave Peter, Eric, and others a good overview of the long-term monitoring activities in Barrow and the types of science being conducted at these facilities and the BEO. My thanks to everyone who helped make our discussions productive, especially Karl, Eric, Jon, Brower, Laci, Araina, and Uinniq, all from UMIAQ. And my thanks to Walter and Marty for tours of the ARM and NOAA facilities, respectively. Despite the hordes of mosquitoes, it was a good visit...one that was both enjoyable and met the goals of the trip.

 

 

Flying kites on the tundra

Scientists can be creative! A perfect example of this creativity reveals itself when the NGEE Arctic project needs to collect aerial images of ice-rich polygons on the Barrow Environmental Observatory. We could rely on high-resolution pictures from aircraft, but given the small area of our intensive site that would be expensive. Unfortunately, the resolution of satellite imagery is too coarse. Why not just hang a camera from a kite? We saw this used quite effectively last year by Craig Tweedie and his students from UTEP, so we thought we'd give it a try!  That's what Baptiste Dafflon and Craig Ulrich (both from LBNL) did yesterday after testing the concept several weeks ago in California.

 

Baptiste and Craig have conducted geophysical surveys on the BEO now for two years. The goal has been not only to understand sub-surface properties like ice content and size and distribution of ice wedges, but also to relate those characteristics to surface properties including topography and the fraction of the landscape seasonally inundated by water. The team needed, however, some way to correlate patterns of inundation to variation in sub-surface properties. The kite seemed like a worthwhile approach to try. It is too early to comment on the overall utility of the idea, but an initial look at the aerial images suggests that the quality of pictures makes this kite-based approach a reasonable one for our purposes.

 

Baptiste and Craig, along with others on the NGEE Arctic team, plan to replace the camera with a spectrometer in hopes of using spectral signatures to identify water distribution and landscape patterns of inundation throughout the season. Then it will be possible to begin drawing correlations between surface and subsurface characteristics and using those insights to improve multi-scale models of terrestrial ecosystems.

Time for tacos...

It seems like my LANL colleagues have instituted a new tradition when in Barrow - Sunday is apparently taco night! Just exactly how this started is uncertain, but Garrett Altmann and others staying in the Herman House apartment, opened their doors to all participants in the NGEE Arctic project for dinner. Garrett and Heather had gone to the store earlier in the day and bought all the necessities for a Santa Fe style mexican dinner. Garrett took over the kitchen with others helping prepare soft and hard shell tacos complete with a spicy meat sauce, tomatoes, lettuce, and avocados. Team NGEE Arctic has a chef that prepares a pretty awesome menu...

 

Dinner attracted nearly 20 hungry scientists, staff, and students from all 4 of the national laboratories and several of our university partners. The food was great and there was a lot of discussion as people got to know each other. I heard a lot of comments like "What do you do?" and "Oh, I sent you an email...". It was a fun night that continued until midnight. Then someone said "Hey, field work starts at 8:00am!" and there was a realization that everyone better get some sleep!

 

 

It was a fun night. Herman House has a 'no shoe' policy so my favorite scene of the night was our front entry way. Shoes were everywhere and a good time was had by all.

 

Night...

Chambers used to estimate CO2 and CH4 flux

One of the primary goals of the NGEE Arctic project is to characterize carbon cycle feedbacks between tundra ecosystems and climate. We have larger, more holistic goals as well, but this is a major component of our studies. Therefore, we have made a considerable effort to emphasize measurements of CO2 and CH4 flux to and from soils and vegetation. This includes deployment of an eddy covariance system on the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO) to characterize carbon fluxes at landscape scales. Dave, Naama, and Margaret are handling those aspects of the project. Dave is from the University of Nebraska and is one of our collaborators; Margaret and Naama are from LBNL. We also took soil cores in the field last spring that we are studying now in the laboratory under controlled conditions. David and Taniya at ORNL are conducting those studies. I look forward to seeing data from these large and small scale investigations.

In addition to our eddy covariance and permafrost core measurements of carbon fluxes, our NGEE Arctic team has also deployed several different manual and automated chambers in the field for estimating CO2 and CH4 fluxes. Evidence for these intermediate-scale approaches can be seen scattered about the tundra. Melanie has placed white PVC collars in our permanent plots and within the eddy covariance footprint. A chamber can be manually attached to these collars and measurements of CO2 and CH4 flux made throughout the summer.

 

Lydia and Bryan, both from LBNL, have deployed similar chambers in our various plots both along our transects and in our intensive plots that encompass low-, transitional-, and high-centered polygons. These chambers can be monitored for carbon fluxes, but they are also being used to collect gas samples for 14C analysis. This is done by connecting small evacuated cylinders to chambers sealed to the soil surface again via collars. Gas samples can then be analyzed for 14C and determinations made as to the age of carbon being emitted from thawing permafrost. These measurements will be critical in combination to some of our other process measurements as we better represent carbon cycle dynamics in models.

 

The chambers that Lydia and Bryan have deployed are convenient for measuring CO2 and CH4 fluxes across that landscape, but tend to be limited to weekly campaigns. It is difficult with those kind of chambers to get temporally-resolved estimates of flux at, for example, hourly intervals throughout the day. We overcome that limitation by using automated chambers. These require a source of power, but can collect information on soil respiration or ecosystem gas exchange, depending on the exact type of chamber, throughout the day, week, or season. Melanie from the University of California, Berkeley has deployed one of these chambers near our eddy covariance tower.

 

Together with our other measurements like soil temperature, moisture, redox, etc., these chambers should be helpful as we seek to improve representation of carbon cycle processes in climate models. Given enough data, we can more fully understand what controls rates of CO2 and CH4 flux for Arctic ecosystems. In order to do that, we must bring together supporting data from genomics, hydrology, biogeochemistry, vegetation dynamics, and subsurface science. We have a good team for tackling this objective.

 

NGEE Arctic enjoys a little publicity

Before leaving for the airport this morning I stopped by the office of the ORNL Laboratory Director, Thom Mason. I don't make a habit of this, but it did, among other things, give me the opportunity to quickly brief him on the NGEE Arctic project.

As I walked into his office, I picked up what I thought was a new glossy brochure highlighting science and technology at ORNL. I was pleased to see that one of those highlights was of our work in the Arctic. The picture that accompanied the article shows Victoria harvesting above-ground plant biomass from one of her vegetation plots last year at our field research site on the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO). Victoria is a post-doc working with Rich, Colleen, and others on the vegetation dynamics tasks and has a keen interest in plant community composition and processes like root growth and distribution of biomass throughout the soil profile.

 

 

I sent the picture to Victoria who is in Barrow again this summer. A quick response indicated that while Victoria was pleased to enjoy her 15 minutes of fame, she didn't know that it would come in the form of a picture showing her sitting on the tundra, wearing a bug jacket, and holding a pair of scissors. I had to laugh. Getting a career started in global change biology is a tricky business, and I agree that field work can at times lack the glamor of other scientific disciplines! However, I suspect that Victoria will have the opportunity to enjoy many more minutes of fame because of her hard work and attention to detail, I'm glad that she is part of the project.

So, what about my NGEE Arctic briefing of Thom Mason? It went well. He has a great understanding of all the work going on across the laboratory. Climate modeling and the importance of field and laboratory measurements that serve to support those models is an area familiar to him. He even had comments about the NGEE Arctic blog. Having thought about it for a few hours now, maybe Thom would enjoy going to Alaska like Martin Keller, Associate Laboratory Director, and others did last year? That was a great trip! Let's see, we could...