2011 PolarTREC orientation participants pose for a group photo after dinner. Photo courtesy of Mike League

During the last week in February, thirteen educators from across the United States convened in Fairbanks, Alaska, to participate in the 2011 PolarTREC Orientation and ShareFair. The annual orientation is the kick off for this rigorous and rewarding National Science Foundation-funded professional development opportunity. Now in its fifth year, PolarTREC improves teacher content knowledge and instructional practices through intensive two-to-eight-week research experiences in the polar regions. While working closely with polar scientists across many scientific disciplines, PolarTREC teachers share information about polar science and the polar regions with their students and communities.

National Science Foundation Einstein Fellow, Laura Lukes tries a reindeer antler on for size at the UAF Reindeer Research Station. Photo courtesy of Janet Warburton

Orientation events included presentations from ARCUS staff who described the PolarTREC program, requirements, and technology. Three PolarTREC alumni and one past PolarTREC researcher attended the orientation to share their experiences and words of wisdom with newly selected teachers.

University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist, Katey Walter Anthony, clears snow from a small pond to try to find methane bubbles trapped in the ice. Photo courtesy of Zeb Polly

A large part of orientation is preparing teachers for the logistical situations unique to the polar regions. Robbie Score from CPS and Roy Stehle from SRI both attended to ensure teachers had a good understanding of typical procedures and the use of satellite phones. Several additional PolarTREC alumni, researchers, and other experts joined the orientation in-person and virtually to present on their areas of expertise.

ARCUS Website Developer Ronnie Owens helps a small group of teachers learn how to post journal entries to the PolarTREC website. Photo courtesy of Zeb Polly

During the orientation’s communication technology training, teachers learned to post online journals, complete with photos and video, from their field camps and stations. Participants also listened to presentations and discussed ideas for sharing the PolarTREC experience with their classrooms, schools, and communities. Between intensive training and hands-on work sessions the whole group also got outside, explored Fairbanks, and learned a little about the Arctic.

Field trips included a visit to the University of Alaska’s (UAF) Museum of the North, the UAF Reindeer Research Program, the World Ice Art Championships, and a visit to a nearby thermokarst pond where Katey Anthony Walter discussed the role of methane in a warming arctic. Teachers also visited the CPS warehouse where Polar Field Service’s Matt Irinaga performed his popular “dressing for work in the Arctic” fashion show.

Matt Irinaga actively describes methods for dressing to work in the Arctic. Photo courtesy of Mike League

Despite the long days, many teachers expressed that the PolarTREC orientation and ShareFair was one of the best professional development workshops they had experienced. At the end of the week they felt well-prepared and enthusiastic about sharing their upcoming experiences.

PolarTREC teachers take photos and record videos as they feed lichen to the reindeer at the UAF Reindeer Research Station. Photo courtesy of Janet Warburton

PolarTREC teachers venturing into the Arctic this year include John Wood, who worked with Susan Natali (University of Florida) studying carbon balance in Healy, Alaska; and Mike Lampert, who is now based at the Svartisen Subglacial Laboratory in Norway with researchers from Iowa State Unversity. Paula Dell is spending April to early June in the Antarctic studying ice fish with Kristin O’Brien from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

In coming events, Jim Pottinger will soon return to Greenland to work with Koni Steffen (University of Colorado) at Swiss Camp, while Jim Miller will visit Barrow, Alaska in June to study microbial activity in thawing permafrost  with David Lipson of San Diego State University.

Teacher expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic will be ongoing throughout the year.

Comments (0) May 03 2011

Like something out of a science fiction movie...ARCLITE LiDARs shine a light on Earth's atmosphere against the backdrop of the Aurora Borealis. Photo: Jeff Thayer

In grade school, most of us were taught that Earth’s atmosphere was layered, like a parfait (as Shrek’s donkey would say).  We memorized the names of these layers and probably thought of each as a discrete entity unrelated to the others – Troposphere, Stratosphere, Mesosphere, Thermosphere, Exosphere.

Turns out, the atmosphere is a lot more dynamic and complicated than a parfait (or even an onion).  Professor Jeffrey Thayer’s (University of Colorado, Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department) ARCLITE (Arctic LiDAR Technology) NSF-funded project uses remote sensing techniques to figure out just how much more complicated the atmosphere really is. Located at the Sondrestrom Upper Atmosphere Research Facility (affectionately known as Kellyville after SRI’s John Kelly, a renowned incoherent scatter radar expert who established the facility), ARCLITE uses cutting-edge technology for studying Earth’s middle and upper atmosphere above the Arctic.

“We don’t yet have whole atmosphere models to describe how matter and energy are transferred across atmospheric layers. LiDAR technology allows us to study the atmosphere across its layers including the region between 35 and 80 km, which is difficult to study using other meteorological methods like weather balloons or satellites,” explains Thayer. “We study the Arctic atmosphere because there are processes unique to the polar regions which may tell us something about climate change.”

Operated by CPS partner SRI International for the National Science Foundation and the Danish Meteorological Institute, Kellyville is located north of the Arctic Circle near Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. The facility is centered on a 32-meter steerable dish antenna. Relocated from Alaska in 1982, the radar was designed to measure parameters characterizing the aurora borealis. The large radar system drove Kellyville’s original infrastructure toward upper atmosphere research, which continues today. Thayer established the ARCLITE project at Kellyville in 1992 and served as principal investigator of the Kellyville facility for seven years (1998-2004), which continues to develop with NSF funding.

“Kellyville currently demands a year-round staff of four or five people for facility and instrument maintenance, various associated engineering projects, and ongoing data operations for about 20 universities at any one time,” explains Thayer. “Over the last several years, we have been upgrading the ARCLITE system to measure more atmospheric parameters. Eventually, the system will be more autonomous to make routine measurements from the upper troposphere and stratosphere through the mesosphere (5-90 km above Earth’s surface) with remote operations. We already have an application that allows us to control our LiDAR at Summit Station using an iPhone. We’re trying to move in that direction with our Kellyville instruments as well.”

A sunny day at Kellyville. Photo: Michael Pederson at sondestrom.com

Sondrestrom houses four slightly different LiDARs. Three “green beam” and one “yellow beam” LiDARs transmit inch-wide green and yellow laser light straight up into the atmosphere. A sensitive Newtonian telescope sees and records the properties of the light reflected back to the Earth’s surface in much the same way as your eyes see (and your brain records) dust in the air in front of a slide projector or flashlight. In this way, Thayer’s group extracts a wide range of information about the middle and upper atmosphere such as density, temperature, aerosol content, and amount of the water vapor.

But Thayer says LiDARs have their limitations as well as advantages.

“Satellites can look at the upper atmosphere, but only in certain configurations. Similarly, for our purposes of looking at the middle and upper atmosphere, LiDAR systems work only in clear weather. We can measure as frequently as weather permits since the LiDARs can’t see through clouds. We schedule about 5-8 hours of observation time each week. Once in a while we get lucky and have longer observation periods in winter, often once Disko Bay freezes over and the winter weather pattern stabilizes. We provide really detailed measurements of the Earth’s atmosphere, just not as frequently as we would like.”

The green beam with the most energy characterizes aerosols, ice clouds, fine particles like smoke, dust, and volcanic ash in the atmosphere all the way to the edge of space. Two others use polarized light to examine aerosols.  The yellow beam ‘resonates’ with sodium atoms in the atmosphere and is used to study the 90-120 km region of the atmosphere where meteorites ablate and leave a shell of calcium, sodium, iron, and magnesium atoms.

Several atmospheric phenomena are unique to the polar regions and Thayer’s group studies all of them. During the winter, a powerful circulation called the Arctic polar vortex occurs in the stratosphere (~20-50km above Earth’s surface). Dynamical changes in the vortex alters the entire polar system and can modify atmospheric chemistry contributing to ozone depletion in the northern hemisphere.

The Thayer team also studies the Aurora Borealis, a natural northern latitude light show resulting from the collision of charged particles with Earth’s magnetic field about 100km above the surface of the earth. Scientists study not only how aurorae form, but also how the aurorae, in turn, might affect the middle atmosphere.

Jeff Thayer tinkers in his garage. Photo: Jeff Thayer

Thayer has been a part of a science investigation to study polar mesospheric clouds using LiDAR. These clouds, also called noctilucent clouds, occur only in the polar regions during the summer. They are the highest clouds in Earth’s atmosphere, forming at about 83 km.  Typically, noctilucent clouds are difficult to see except at twilight as the sun reflects on them from below the horizon.  Noctilucent clouds, Thayer says, may be harbingers of climate change, but their role remains unclear.

“We see clouds because of water vapor and cold temperatures in the atmosphere. It’s tough to get water through the troposphere, where we live, to the middle atmosphere because temperatures at the tropopause are very cold and cause the water to freeze out and fall back to earth.  So we don’t expect to see clouds as high as 83 km. But water can be created in the middle atmosphere, the mesosphere, by the presence of methane. At higher altitudes ultraviolet light breaks down the methane and forms water vapor which leads to cloud formation. If we see more clouds, then we may be getting more CO2 in the upper atmosphere as well. The role of CO2 in the mesosphere actually cools the region in contrast to its warming of the troposphere. The cooler temperatures can further support polar mesospheric cloud formation and we can use the clouds’ behavior as indicators of change associated with CO2 and methane. However, we still have a great deal to understand about our whole atmosphere and all of the exchange processes that occur across its layers.”—Marcy Davis

Comments (1) Mar 14 2011

Part of the 2010 UW Clean Snowmobile Challenge Team. All photos from the University of Wisconsin Snowmobile Team website

We recently spoke with Jay Meldrum, Director of the Keweenaw Research Center at Michigan Technical University, about the annual Clean Snowmobile Challenge (CSC) in Houghton Michigan, and the conversation left us wanting to know more about what it’s like to participate in the engineering contest.

To find out more, we talked with Ethan Brodsky who participated in the Clean Snowmobile Challenge while a graduate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison during the early 2000s. Now a staff scientist in radiology and medical imaging at his alma mater, Brodsky became the “unofficial advisor” (Glenn Bower is the official advisor)  to the school’s CSC team in 2008. He offers a unique perspective on the past, present, and future of the Society of Automotive Engineers Clean Snowmobile Challenge competition.

Ethan Brodsky and the University of Wisconsin zero emissions snowmobile, the Silent BuckEV, at Summit Station.

“Participating in these student vehicle competitions was one of the highlights of my college career,” relates Brodsky. “Each event culminates in a week-long competition that is exhilarating like nothing else I’ve experienced. It’s a sleep-deprived rush that can only end in two ways: either you win and it was all worth it, or somebody else does, and those weeks of late nights in the garage were all wasted.”

Brodsky said most students participate as an extracurricular activity out of personal interest, although some receive independent study credit. Brodsky became the pseudo-advisor to UW’s Clean Snowmobile Challenge team in graduate school. The team consists of about 15 students who spend the year tweaking snowmobile engines to reduce emissions without sacrificing performance in preparation for the competition.

“Most students do it a couple of years for fun or as a resume builder or to help get into grad school,” explains Brodsky. “But some people really get into the leadership roles and stick around for their entire college career.”

Today Brodsky is one of UW’s CSC team advisors who has helped lead the team to championships for gas-powered snowmobiles in 2009 and 2010. The zero-emissions snowmobile won the 2008, 2009, and 2010 competitions.

The Silent BuckEV at competition in the Zero Emissions category of the Clean Snowmobile Challenge.

“The UW College of Engineering has had a tradition of excellence across our automotive student design projects dating back over a decade. We’ve won five hybrid vehicle competitions, taken home seven first-place trophies at the CSC, and won a number of other national SAE events.  A lot of the credit goes to Dr. Glenn Bower, the senior student vehicle projects advisor—his dedication to the projects and the students is immeasurable. He expects a lot from everyone and drives the students to do their best.

In 2008 Brodsky was invited to bring the winning zero emissions snowmobile to Summit Station, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research station on Greenland’s ice sheet summit, where it would be rotated into the station’s snowmobile fleet (The NSF has supported the zero-emissions competition for years, most recently through this NSF grant.  It was a whirlwind trip—three days in which he tested the snowmobile in the harsh Greenland environment. At Summit, Brodsky did a lot of test-driving. He also taught Summit staffers to run, handle, and maintain the retrofitted machine. In all, the staff learned how to take the snowmobile apart and put it back together, how to charge the 350 volt batteries and keep them running, and how to download data (how many miles driven) from the attached data logger. In 2009, UW again loaned its winning snowmobile to Summit Station, where it was used all summer.

“Greenland was the most other-worldly place I’ve ever been,” says Brodsky. “Just the white landscape as far as I could see against the blue sky.  It was a very lonely-feeling place, far from everything, very alien. It was an awesome trip!”

Looking ahead, Brodsky says he would like to see opportunity for riskier design in future Clean Snowmobile Challenges. When the competition began in 2000, students’ snowmobiles were better than anything sold in the market. In the interim, snowmobile manufacturers have adopted myriad changes and cleaned up their machines. Meanwhile, the rules of competition have changed very little in the last 10 years. Teams are allowed only to alter the engine but Brodsky says this is somewhat limiting now in terms of innovation as many technologies developed in the last decade may not yet be applied to competition designs.

The UW team prepares battery packs.

So, Brodsky says in the meantime, his zero-emissions team will focus on trying to build a more robust snowmobile that’s more useful in Greenland and, hopefully, Antarctica. The next step, Brodsky says, is to develop a better battery management system with batteries that can run all the way down and that can better handle Greenland’s cold temperatures.  He would also like to develop battery packs that can last five years. In any case, he’s still having fun.

“It’s funny—because of these projects, my friends seem to get younger and younger. Or, I guess I’m just getting old. We still stay up all night working together on snowmobile designs. It was the most exciting part of my college experience and of my life in general.”—Marcy Davis

For more, visit the Clean Snowmobile Challenge website.

Comments (0) Mar 01 2011

Testing 1,2,3....Natalie Boelman does a sound (recording) check after setting up the first acoustic monitoring station. All photos by Natalie Boelman.

Satellite images show that since the early 1980s Arctic North America has been “greening.” To date, most research on the causes and effects of greening have dealt with how vegetation changes affect energy budgets and how nutrients like carbon and nitrogen cycle between plants and soil. How vegetation changes influence the distribution of arctic animals and birds is less well-understood, but Ecosystem Ecologist Natalie Boelman (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University) along with colleagues Laura Gough (University of Texas at Arlington), and John Wingfield (University of California, Davis) want to change this, with NSF support, by learning more about arctic phenology—how climate warming-induced changes to tundra vegetation and earlier snowmelt dates affect the reproductive success of migratory songbirds.

Field Technician Carol Moulton and graduate student Matthew Rich haul a tripod across the tundra.

“Our overall goal is to characterize the interactions between tundra vegetation and migratory songbirds in habitats that differ in shrub dominance over five consecutive growing seasons that will differ in timing of snow melt and severity of weather events,” explains Boelman. “I think that it’s important for readers to know that we are establishing a baseline to which future vegetation-songbird interactions can be compared, for a system in which such data are virtually non-existent. This baseline will be critical to our ability to measure how migratory songbirds are being, and will continue to be, impacted by warming-induced changes in shrub cover and changing seasonality. We are testing a series of predictions related to songbird populations and communities and their interactions with vegetation and insects, to begin to untangle the complex relationships among these groups in the context of a changing climate.”

Boelman and colleagues focus on two bird species: the Lapland longspur and the White-crowned sparrow. Both species are songbirds, included in a group of more than 4000 species having specific and often elaborate bird songs which communicate territorial and mating information. Both species migrate to the Arctic each summer to breed—the longspur from the central North America and the sparrow from southern North America, and even Mexico.

Setting up a "mist net" to catch birds. Once the birds were caught, the team took blood samples and made measurements to assess their overall condition (then they let them go).

“While the White-crowned sparrow builds its nest in shrub vegetation, the Lapland longspur selects non-shrubby, open tundra for its nest. We wanted to explore how these two species, with contrasting nesting requirements, are each going to be impacted by increasing shrub cover on the tundra.”

Taking a blood sample from a White-crowned sparrow.

In 2010, the team based out of Toolik Field Station and worked in nearby Atigun Valley, near Imnavait Creek and just south of Happy Valley. Boelman’s team set up four experimental field sites, each with a “shrub plot” and an “open plot.” They also installed weather stations and acoustic monitoring stations at each site and sampled flora and fauna along 100 m transects weekly, between mid-May and the end of July.

Listen to a songbird recording here

Teams of 10 or so, including Principal Investigators, undergraduate and graduate students rotated in and out during the summer. Each day the entire crew would visit one or two field sites. At each they completed a long list of tasks. Boelman says, “We’d typically divide and conquer, helping each other out when need be, before heading back to camp.”

Jesse Krause catches insects using the "sweep netting" method.

Daily field chores included:
• Maintenance of weather, snow cover, and acoustic monitoring stations
• Vegetation measurements including species makeup and cover, berry and catkin abundance
• Collection of ground and flying insects
• Bird-specific measurements such as census counts, nest locating, blood sampling, and body condition assessment

Acoustic monitoring stations included a microphone set to record sound in the frequency range of 140-18,000 Hz. The team set stations to turn on four times a day – at 2, 6, and 9a.m. and 6p.m.—and record whatever was making noise (hopefully, the Lapland longspur and/or the White-crowned sparrow as well as other songbirds). Recordings helped the scientists track the presence (or absence) and numbers of the migratory songbirds as well as their activity levels from when the birds arrive on the tundra in mid-May until their southward migration in the fall.

Stations also included a camera for monitoring snow cover during the melt period between spring and summer, as well as weather sensors which measure and record temperature, wind speed and direction and precipitation. All equipment was assembled on large tripods at Toolik Field Station and driven to the field sites, which were located along a short latitudinal gradient along the Dalton Highway. From the drop off points, the team carried or dragged the tripods using a sled over the tundra to the field sites. Tripod bases were left to spend the winter on the tundra, but rented monitoring equipment will be re-installed each field season.

Sometimes getting tripods to their site is challenging.

“Because we are interested in how changing arctic seasonality is impacting migratory songbirds, we will track these parameters for five consecutive years, so that we can better understand their responses to inter-annual variability in spring snow-melt timing,” says Boelman. “Since snowmelt has been found to be occurring earlier as a result of arctic warming, their response to variation in snowmelt date from one year to the next will provide us with important hints as to how we should expect songbirds to respond to increasingly earlier spring snow melt dates.”

Getting ready to record plant species using a "percent cover" grid.

Boelman and her colleagues will be working with two teachers from Fairbanks, Alaska (who spent two weeks in June working with scientists at Toolik Field Station) and educational staff from the Alaska Bird Observatory to develop educational materials that meet science curricula standards for high school students. They will also set up a long-term monitoring site in Fairbanks where students will learn to follow the scientific protocols used in the Toolik-based field study.

The five-year study will mean a lot of time away from home, but Boelman clearly enjoys her field work and colleagues.

“Leaving my husband and children for weeks at a time is the hardest challenge for me. At the same time, it’s really great to get out of the Urban Jungle (aka New York City) and head up to the beauty of the Alaskan tundra to focus on nothing but tundra ecology,” she says. “It’s incredibly fascinating and inspiring to be up there, learning and improving my understanding of the interconnectedness within the ecosystem. To boot, I get to do all this in collaboration with a very knowledgeable and friendly assemblage of researchers, students, support staff and friends. Finally, having the luxury of working out of and living at the Toolik Field Station is something that any Arctic field ecologist can certainly appreciate, and I for one certainly do!”—Marcy Davis

For more information and photos from the 2010 field season, visit the project website.

Comments (1) Feb 23 2011

PolarTREC teacher Jim Pottinger does the hokey-pokey at Summit Station. All photos: Jim Pottinger

“Sleeping in a tent in the Arctic was a new experience for me. Temperatures dipped below 0°F and the winds were consistently blowing against the tent.”– Jim Pottinger, 2010 PolarTREC teacher

Jim Pottinger enjoys cold weather, so living at Summit Station’s Tent City on the Greenland ice cap for a week was fine by him. Camping atop 3200 meters of ice was one of several new experiences for the Pennsylvania native who travelled to Greenland last summer as part of the PolarTREC Program. Pottinger’s team, which is led by PI Konrad Steffen (CIRES), travelled to Summit to maintain instrumentation for the NSF-funded BSRN – Compatible Irradiance Measurements and the Stable Boundary Layer

At Summit Station, Pottinger worked with Karl Schroff and Hansjoerg Frei (from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and Nikko Bayou (UC Boulder).

After a long day of shoveling snow Nikko Bayou reaches the APTU at last.

Their first task was to locate and retrieve an Automated Temperature Profiling Unit (APTU), which started its mission recording high altitude weather data in 2007.

“After a four-mile bone-chilling [snowmobile] ride, we arrived at the site. It was a beautiful location in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet. The sky was blue, the terrain was white and there was nothing as far as the eye could see,” Pottinger wrote in his August 14 journal.

They located the unit by GPS. Only two feet of the ten-foot tall APTU tripod was sticking up out of the snow. It took six hours and digging down about twenty feet before they freed the tripod and data logger using snowmobiles and ropes.

Elevating the Automatic Weather Station - turns out it looks tougher than it is.

The team’s next task was to elevate Summit’s AWS, one of eighteen such stations in Greenland. First, the scientists attached cable extensions to accommodate the station’s new height. Next, they erected a tripod over the station, attached a rope to the top of the AWS, and lifted the station ten feet while inserting an extension tube to the base. Once the station was secure, they removed the tripod and later verified data transmission. The entire data transmission process only took one hour!

Next, they dug a 140-centimeter deep snow pit next to the AWS. Pottinger recorded the pit’s snow structure, making notes of density, snow crystal shape and size, layer thickness and volume  every ten centimeters. These measurements will help ground-truth the AWS and ensure that sensors were working properly over the two previous years.

Pottinger becomes an old hand at snow pit measurements.

Pottinger also assisted in elevating and calibrating BSRN instrumentation and learned about ongoing NOAA weather experiments.

Pottinger’s visit coincided with Summit’s transition between seasonal crews. This meant a busy couple of days while winter preparations were made. Following a great end of season dinner, Pottinger spent his last night in the Big House and flew out with a jubilant summer crew the next morning.

Summer crew kicks back at the end of the season party at Lake Fergueson.

Pottinger, who has a background in geology, coordinates the GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) program at Gateway High School in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. He acts as an academic advisor, making sure students are on an academic path consistent with their post-secondary goals, and as a science teacher, giving periodic guest lectures in science classes.

Pottinger hopes to return to Greenland’s Swiss Camp next May with Steffen. He will again be involved in systems maintenance and hopes to learn more about how the collected data is being used in various science projects. In the meantime, he’s keeping busy sharing his experience with students, teachers and community. Pottinger hopes he can begin to correct some of the misconceptions people have about climate change, the Arctic, and the people who live there.—Marcy Davis

Comments (0) Jan 20 2011