Matthew Sturm Glen Liston Chuck Racine Jon Holmgren Peter Olsson Ken Tape Karl Volz April Cheurvront
The Snow, Shrubs and Weather Group has visited Council twice this
winter to make measurements. We went in early December and just
returned from a week-long trip yesterday. It has been an unusual
snow year to date, with virtually no snow in Nome and Council in
October through December. On our December trip we drove in with a
pick-up truck; it has been 20 years since the road stayed open that
late. Storms finally started to build the snow pack in mid-January,
so we were finally able to snow-mobile in on the recent trip. At
Council we continue to monitor snow conditions at 5 sites with
varying degrees of shrubbiness. At each site we make measurements of
snow depth and character, and measure the albedo under a 50-m
cableway, photographing the snow and ground beneath the cableway at
the same time. These latter measurements augment the same sort of
measurements we made during the snow melt of 2001. The albedo
measurements have shown that the amount of shrubs is important, with
the exposed shrub percentage having a large impact on the local
albedo. Where shrubs are exposed, the albedo is often lowered 25 to
40%. These measurements will be continued through the winter and
spring. Some of the time spent in Council on the most recent trip
was in preparation for our Nome to Barrow traverse in March and
April. We have been pre-positioning equipment and supplies for that
trip,repairing snow mobiles and arranging logistics.
One new aspect of our work is in the area of outreach. As part of
the our up-coming traverse, we have enlisted the aid of teachers in
White Mountain, Selawik, Buckland, Ambler and Atqasuk. With their
students the teachers are recording the snowfall history for the
winter. We plan to use these data to help us put time labels on key
strata in the snow pack, which will add in chemical sampling for
moisture source identification. In exchange, we plan to visit at the
schools when we pass through each village. On the recent trip we
snow-mobiled down the river to White Mountain for half a day where we
taught 3rd through 6th grade (see attached jpeg). The kids seemed to
enjoy it and so did we. We also are reaching kids through the
NSF-TEA program. Ms. April Cheuvront, an 8th grade teachers has
accompanied us on our past two trips and will go with us to Barrow.
Her journal for the last two trips can be found at
http://tea.rice.edu/tea_cheuvrontfrontpage.html and she will be
posting journal entries during the long traverse.
Matthew Sturm