In most years I would have travelled to Barrow two or three
times already for field research, but not this season. Various activities
including writing the NGEE Arctic Phase 2 proposal kept me and many others at
their desks. Now that those responsibilities are behind me I can fortunately
enjoy time on the tundra with colleagues from around the country. And if today
is an example of what the next couple of weeks will hold then I am confident
that June will be a busy month.
First thing this morning I picked up Bob, Go, and Sina, all with
the University of Alaska Fairbanks, from the Barrow airport. Bob and Go have
been involved with the NGEE Arctic project for several years. Sina, on the
other hand, is enjoying her first year as a post-doc from Germany with the
project. You might have seen her blog post earlier in the season when she and
Bob installed a high-resolution infrared (IR) camera atop a 10-meter tower on
the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO). She is back this week to download
data and make adjustments to the tower and camera now that they have been in
place for a month or two.
Bryan, Ori, and Ian are also back in Barrow (LBNL). Bryan
and Ori are veterans while Ian was in Barrow earlier in the season, but
otherwise this is his first summer on the project. These three will be making
adjustments to the NGEE Arctic tram that was installed on the BEO in May. The
tram, complete with 65-meter track and cart carrying multi sensors for energy
balance measurements, delivered a lot of great information last season and we
look forward to similar insights this year. The tram including the cart and the
rails were redesigned over the winter with help from Keith and Shawn (BNL). Bryan,
Ori, and Ian will also be checking up on two solar panels installed for a
geophysical ERT array and evaluating a micro-plot warming technique that they
and Margaret Torn (LBNL) developed over the winter. We plan to deploy that
technique in July and August to look at CO2 and CH4 flux
from active layer soils that are warmed by -4 degrees centigrade. This will be
done to address a specific hypothesis about rates of greenhouse gas emissions
from decomposing organic matter in thawing soils. Such information will be used
to improve the representation of soil organic matter decomposition in models. Stay
tuned for an update on that experiment later in the summer.
For now, it’s good to be back in Barrow…
