2011 Snow Ice Edition

8/12/2019 2011 Snow Ice Edition

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sph res

2011

EDITION

04

SNOW&ICE

COOPERATIVE INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES

Enter the breachWhat do openings inthe ice mean for theGreenland Ice Sheet?

Permafrostcarbon bomb

Arctic science andInuit knowledge

Safe from melting,for now

Dust-covered snowtaxes water


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Goodbye, ice hello, snow and rainMore rain is falling on the

Arctic Ocean in autumn.

Indigenous knowledgeand scienceInuit forecasters help

CIRES scientists understand

climate changes.

Hats off to BarryCIRES salutes Roger Barrys

achievements as he retires.

Robbing the WestSnow dusted with desert soil

melts fast, and the Colorado

River loses water.

Disappearing actsThe minimum summer Arctic

sea ice extent keeps shrinking,

and Greenlands Ice Sheet loses

weight up north.

After the breakupGround-based instruments

help CIRES scientists under-

stand Antarctic changes.

CIRES sense of iceCIRES researchers learn

how the Greenland Ice Sheet

loses mass.

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On the cover: Graduate student

Daniel McGrath enters a moulin

in Greenland to measure

waterflow. Konrad Steffen/CIRES

Unmanned aircrafttake hardiness toAntarctic extremes

A tiny airplane packs outsized

value for science.

The coolest memberof the data familyCIRES helps NASA maintain

masses of data on cryosphere.

Birds-eye perspective

on the planetCIRES Fellow Waleed Abdalati

relies on remote sensing to

study glaciers and sea ice.

Ice core isotopes revealmore than temperature

Clues locked in layers of ice could

reveal high-def view of Arctic.

Greenlands ice sheetreal-time, real fast

CIRES Director Konrad Steffensets up instruments across

Greenland, to forecast weather

and track climate in the region.

Not forgottenOld satellite data may help

scientists gain new insight

on Arctic changes.

An ice crystal is bornCIRES Fellow Margaret Tolbert

puts ice crystallization under

the microscope.

Student Focus:Kelly BaustianCIRES graduate student tries

to understand which particles

are ice-friendly.

Highest-elevation

glaciers keep their coolGlaciers in the Nepal Himalaya

are not melting over much of

their area.

Frozen carbon bombis tickingThawing frozen ground called

permafrost threatens climate.

MySphere: Swiss CampA collapse in 2009 means

operating the chilly, long-termscience research station

without a sauna for now.

This issue


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$75,000

When the snow

melts, youll see these

big black holes. Its kind

of mysterious whats

down there. Where

does this water go?

Whats the impact?

Daniel McGrath, talking about his fascinationwith moulins. Read more about CIRES workwith moulins on Page 8.

Arctic sea ice extent in September 2010. The long-termaverage is 2.70 million. The difference in extent is nearly as

big as the area occupied by Alaska and Texas, combined.

$75,000

CIRES Director Konrad Steffen was lead author ofThe Greenland Ice Sheet in a Changing Climate.CIRES scientist Walt Meier co-authored that report,and was also an

author ofArcticReport Card 2010.

1.89 millionsquare miles

Cost of each of the unmanned planes used by CIRESresearchers to observe polynyas in Antarctica in 2009.

The researchers began with four planes and lost only oneduring the missions. Read more about the research resultson Page 10.

Read more about Himalayan glacier melt on Page 20.

Author, author

Relative mountain range heights

October 2010

:- . . . . :

: . . . .

:. . . :

: . . . .

Himalayas~29,000 ft.

Andes

~22,000 ft.

Alps~15,000 ft.

Colorado Rockies~14,000 ft.

1


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Indigenous knowledge

and scienceInuit forecasters with generationsof environmental knowledge helpscientists understand Arctic weather

Learn moreListen to a podcast interview with the paper authors athttp://cires.colorado.edu/news/press/2010/gearheardinuit.html.


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An Inuk living in the Canadian Arctic looks to thesky and can tell by the way the wind scatters a cloudwhether a storm is coming. Thousands of miles awayin a Boulder laboratory, scientists collect data and usecomputer models to make similar weather predictions.These distinct practices serve the same purpose.But in the past 20 years, somethings run amok with

Inuit forecasting. Old weather signals dont mean whatthey used to. The cloud that scatters could signal astorm that comes in an hour instead of a day. Elsewhere,researchers had heard the reports from Arctic communi-ties of unpredictable weather. But the stories didnt seemto match up with the researchers models. By scienticmeasurement, weather around the world appeared tobe growing more persistent with less variation. Thedisparity left scientists including CIRES scientist BetsyWeatherhead, who has long been interested in the issue scratching their heads.Weatherhead contacted Shari Gearheard, a scientist

with CIRES National Snow and Ice Data Center, wholives in Clyde River, Nunavut, Canada, an Inuit commu-nity on eastern Bafn Island. For the past 10 years, Gear-heard has been working with Inuit hunters and elders in their own language, which Gearheard speakstodocument their knowledge of the environment and envi-ronmental change. Gearheard meticulously collects thestories told to her by the Inuit and makes systematic re-cords of indigenous environmental knowledge. Throughthis, patterns begin to emerge, leading Weatherhead andcolleague Distinguished Professor Roger Barry, a CIRESFellow, to focus their analysis on patterns of weatherpersistence in the springtime.Statistical analyses of day-to-day temperatures at

Baker Lake, Nunavut, showed that during May to June,the persistence of temperature has recently declined,matching Inuit reports of greater unpredictability for thatseason.The scientic analyses matched what the Inuits were

witnessing on the ground. Weather along the Arctic

Photos courtesy of Shari Gearheard, CIRES NSIDC,

Lasalie Joanasie, a hunter from Clyde River, Nunavut, checks weatherand ice conditions while scanning for seals during spring hunting.

latitudes was behaving more unpredictably than in

other parts of the world. Thats an incredibly importantparameter to care about, incredibly important, saidWeatherhead. One way I describe it is if an inch of rainfalls at my house in the month of July, I dont need toturn on the sprinklers. But if there is one inch of rain on

July 1 and no rain after that, my lawn is dead.Ecosystems have evolved under a certain type of pat-

tern. So if the pattern is changing, that could be just asimportant as a small increase in temperature or some ofthe other changes were talking about, Weatherheadcontinued.

The study helps rene and test climate models, whilealso providing these models with a new category ofinformation to consider. And Gearheards work with theInuit is demonstrating the value of indigenous environ-mental knowledge to modern climate science.Indigenous knowledge didnt always have the place it

does now in research, Gearheard added. Its grow-ing. People are becoming more familiar with it, morerespectful of it.

Hats off to Roger G. BarryIn December 2010, we wished a fond retire-

ment to Distinguished Professor and long-time

CIRES Fellow Roger G. Barry. He has directed

the World Data Center for Glaciology (WDC)

since 1976. Under Barrys leadership the WDC/

National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)

grew from a sta of two in 1977 to about 90

in 2008, when he stepped down as Director. A

leader in the cryospheric science community,Barry shares a legacy of discovery about Arctic

and mountain climates and cryospheric pro-

cesses, climate change, and collaborations incor-

porating indigenous environmental knowledge

into scientic weather analysis. He published

Atmosphere, Weather and Climate in 1968

(now in its ninth edition), Mountain Weather

and Climate (three editions, two translations) ,

and three other textbooks, as well as over 200

scientic papers and chapters. Barrys fth and

most recent book, The Global Cryosphere

Past, Present and Future, will be published in

June 2011. His outstanding scholarly work led

him to be a John Simon Guggenheim Memo-

rial Foundation fellow in 1982, a 2001 Fulbright

teaching fellow for Geography in Moscow, and

a reviewer of the Intergovernmental Panel onClimate Change (IPCC) report that received the

Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He was awarded

the Founders Medal of the Royal Geographical

Society in 2008 and currently holds a Humboldt

Prize Fellowship. Barry served seven years as

the associate director for the Cryospheric and

Polar Processes Division, and inspired nearly 60

climate and cryospheric graduate students.

Director ofthe World DataCenter forGlaciology

DistinguishedProfessor

CIRES Fellow

Former Directorof the NationalSnow and IceData Center

3

Shari Gearheard


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The cinnamon toast-like coating on snow in the UpperColorado River Basin doesnt just ruin a scenic vista, itmakes the snow melt faster and skims valuable waterfrom the Wests most important river: the Colorado.But the news is good, in part. By cutting down on dust

we could restore some of the lost ow, which is criticalas the Southwestern climate warms, said Brad Udall,director of the Western Water Assessment (WWA) a

joint program of CIRES and NOAA.Udall is one of a team of scientists including Jeffrey

Deems from CIRES WWA and the National Snowand Ice Data Center(NSIDC), who havebeen investigating theeyesores impact onsnowmelt and riverrunoff.Snow dusted with

dark particles absorbsa greater fraction ofthe Suns rays andmelts faster than white

snow, said study leaderThomas Painter ofNASAs Jet PropulsionLaboratory and an af-

liate of CIRES NSIDC. It is really like taking a relativelyclean snowpack and almost doubling the sunlight hittingit. Earlier snowmelt then lets the growing season ofsnow-covered vegetation start earlier and more water islost through evaporation and transpiration, he said. Thatleaves less water for the Colorado River.Heavy dust coatings on the snowpack are a relatively

recent phenomenon: Since the mid-1800s onwards, ac-tivities such as livestock grazing and road building havedisturbed the desert soil and broken up the soil crust thatcurbs wind erosion. Winds then whip up the desert dust from northwest New Mexico, northeast Arizona, andsouthern Utah and drop it on mountains downwindthat form the rivers headwaters, said Deems.To evaluate how the dust impacts snowmelt, the team

used a hydrology model that has been shown to simulate

Robbing

the WestDust on snow reducesColorado River runoby 5 percent

snowmelt and river ows in the Colorado Basin. Theresearchers modeled the rate of mountain snowmeltand volume of runoff at Lees Ferry in Arizona, the pointat which the water ow is gauged and subsequentlyallocated.They looked at two scenarios in their models: the

lower dust conditions prior to the disturbance ofdesert soils in the 20th century and the levels of dustobserved between 2003 and 2008.

Snowmelt in the current dusty conditions occurrednearly three weeks earlier than in pre-settlement condi-tions, the results showed, and an average of 5 percentless water owed into the river above Lees Ferry.That quantity of water lost is twice Las Vegas current

water right. Its about half of what the state of Arizonatakes down through its Central Arizona Project andtwice what the city of Denver uses in a year, saidUdall. It is a large chunk of water.

Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies (CSAS)

Above: Dust on snow covers a mountain range in the RockyMountains. Right: CSAS Director Chris Landry and graduate stu-dents Annie Bryant and McKenzie Skiles take samples to measure

impurities in the snowpack.

TheScience

Water loss in the

Colorado River from

fast-melting, dust-

covered snow may

equal twice the

amount Las Vegasuses in a year.


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Tracking Arctic sea ice lossThe sea ice blanketing much of the Arctic Ocean

grows in the winter and shrinks in the summer, hitting aminimum every year around September. In 2010, thatminimum was the third lowest since 1979, when thesatellite record began, CIRES scientists calculated.CIRES National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)

tracks Arctic sea ice extent every year. Although windsand other weather patterns leave more ice some years,less others, the sea ice has declined precipitously over-all. The summertime minimum extent has plummeted ata rate of more than 11 percent per decade since 1979,according to NSIDC.

All indications are that sea ice will continue to de-cline over the next several decades, said CIRES FellowMark Serreze, NSIDC director. We are looking at aseasonally ice-free Arctic in twenty to thirty years.In September 2010, Arctic sea ice stretched for only

about 1.89 million square miles, less than any otheryear except 2008 (1.8 million square miles) and 2007(1.65 million). The long-term average for the month ofSeptember (1979-2000) is 2.70 million square miles.

Greenland Ice Sheet losing ice mass

from northwest coastIce loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet, which has been

increasing during the past decade over its southernregion, is now moving up its northwest coast, accordingto an international study published in 2010.CIRES Fellow John Wahr was among international sci-

entists who studied data from NASAs Gravity and Re-covery Climate Experiment satellite system, or GRACE.The team compared GRACE measurements with othersmade by global positioning systems afxed to bedrock

on the edges of the ice sheet.On Greenlands northwest coast, the Earth surface

rose by 1.5 inches from October 2005 to August 2009,because less ice was pressing down upon it. AlthoughGRACEs resolution is not precise enough to pinpointthe source of the ice loss, the fact that the ice sheet islosing mass nearer to the ice sheet margins suggeststhe ows of Greenland outlet glaciers there are slidingdownhill fast, dumping more ice in the ocean.

Disappearing acts

Sea iceextent inSeptember2010; thepink lineshowslong-termaverage forthe month.NSIDC


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Ground-based instruments inthe Antarctic Peninsula shedlight on ice sheet collapse

After the

breakupWhen a chunk of ice larger than

Rhode Island broke off the AntarcticLarsen Ice Shelf and crumbled intothe ocean below, in 2002, even

experienced glaciologists weresurprised.We simply didnt know an ice

sheet could do that, said glaciolo-gist Ted Scambos of CIRES NationalSnow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).Not just break up, but collapseinto a pile of rubble that was astunner.Scambos and other scientists imme-

diately began to monitor the impacts

of the ice sheet collapse on thesurrounding Larson B breakup regionby satellite, as part of the NationalScience Foundation-funded LarsenIce Shelf System, Antarctica (LAR-ISSA) Project. They found neighboringglaciers began to accelerate at once,and within a year were moving six toten times faster than they had been

prior to the breakup. The glaciersalso began to thin rapidly and theremnant Larsen ice shelf, called theScar Inlet Shelf, showed the same

surface melting and cracking thatpreceded the main Larsen B breakup.This promises to be a great natural

experiment, Scambos said. If wecan get more data on the remnantshelf and its feeder glaciers, thenwell really get some insight intothe causes and effects of ice shelfdisintegration.Monitoring the region by satellite

alone, however, doesnt give the

whole story, Scambos said. To get acloser view, Scambos and NSIDC re-searchers Rob Bauer and Terry Harantravelled to the Antarctic Peninsulain December 2009 and in threemonths set up eld-based monitoringsystems. The systems, called auto-mated meteorology-ice-geophysicssystems (AMIGOS), were equipped

with weather instruments, GPS units,and cameras and were stationed onthe remaining ice sheet and a nearbyglacier. Since their installation, theyhave transmitted data and photo-graphs back to the scientists throughsatellite telephone uplinks.Scambos hopes the eld-based

studies will give insight not only intothe causes of ice sheet breakups, butinto threshold conditions for break-

ups. With this greater understanding,scientists could forecast what areasof the Antarctic might be close to abig change in terms of ice stabilityand what the regional environmen-tal implications of the disintegrationmight be, he said.The ground-based instrumentation

has already added to scientists un-

Ted Scambos (front) and Martin Truffer stand on the Scar Inlet Ice Shelf, a remnant piece ofthe Larsen B Ice Shelf. Scambos and Truffer (and Erin Pettit, not shown) are conducting aradar survey of the shelf to determine its thickness, and using GPS to measure flow speed.


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derstanding of the system, Scambossaid. The temperature sensors have

shown that there is no specic meltseason and frozen season. A meltcan happen at any time of the year,he said. Also, the observations showthat the temperature of the remain-ing ice sheet is now within the rangeat which most ice sheets break up.Sometime in the next decade, itwill disintegrate.

Martin Truffer checks radar profile data of the ice sheet on Leppard Glacier, Antarctica.Radar profiles of the ice thickness will be repeated to look for changes in the ice.

Above: Terry Haran (left) and Martin Truffersteady the tower during the installationof the AMIGOS-3 station on Flask Glacier.The station (from the top) has a GPSantenna, an Iridium uplink antenna fordata transmission, solar panels, a weatherinstrument boom arm, and an electron-ics enclosure (white box) for gathering,processing, and transmitting the data.


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CIRES sense of ice

Matter of momentumFly over the Greenland Ice Sheet during the melt season,

and theres a good chance youll see turquoise riverssnaking their way across the ice surface. Often, mysteri-

ous drains, called moulins, swallow these rivers, takingwater on a journey through the ice. While moulins havefascinated mountaineers and glaciologists for decades, littleis known about where this water goes or its impact on themovement of the ice sheet.On the Greenland Ice Sheet, CIRES graduate student

Daniel McGrath and colleagues installed a gauging stationto measure meltwater drainage into a moulin, during a 15-day period at the peak of the melt season. Their plan was

to study the timing of water traveling across the surface ofthe ice and the impacts of it falling into moulins.McGrath and his colleagues found that although it takes

about three hours for meltwater to travel through the ice sur-face stream system, once it enters the moulin, it is transferred

to the water table below in less than 30 minutes, almostinstantaneous by glaciological standards. Rapid pulses ofmeltwater can set off chain reactions that temporarily boostice sheet velocity. These moulin surges differ from meltwaterdrainage via crevasses, which is often slow and steady, andthus less likely to inuence the speed of the ice sheet.Next up, McGrath says, is to watch the system evolve

over an entire melt season. This was just a snapshot intime.

Scientists have a pretty good idea that melt is responsible for about half the current

loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Less well-understood are the mechanisms for the other50 percent the breaking apart of the ice itself and its loss into the sea. Now, several

closely-related studies about waters eects inside glaciers and the Greenland Ice Sheet

are revealing a clearer picture of the forces that inuence the behavior and loss of ice.

CrevassesA moving ice sheet formscrevasses as it fights theforces of friction. Meltwaterflows into the crevasses,warming the ices interiorand causing new fracturesto form as the water freezesand expands.

InteriorMeltwaterMyriad internalfractures allowmeltwater to drainthrough the ice.

Warm IceWarmer waterseeks a temperatureequilibrium, so ittransfers heat tonearby ice. Thesubsequently warmerice moves much fasterthan cooler ice.

VoidPockets inside the ice

sheet collect meltwater.Pooling water bothchanges the buoyancyand temperature of the ice.

Supraglacial RiversMeltwater travels an icy riversystem en route to a moulin.During peak discharge,this process takes about2.5 to 3 hours.


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Feeling the pressurePorous ice sheets hold a lot of water, the effects of

which are still relatively unknown. CIRES graduatestudent William Colgan took a look inside moulins tosee how the Greenland Ice Sheet handles the addedpressure from meltwater. All signs point toward a

temporary boost to the ice sheets speed.Colgan developed a model to study how meltwater

moves from the surface of the ice sheet through itsinterior, and compared this model with ice velocity datacollected from the eld.He found that the water table inside the ice rises and

falls each year in response to summer melt. Further-more, the ice sheets velocity appears to be tied to howthe water table rises each day. In high melt years, thewater table rises quicker, creating a short-lived surgein movement. Thats likely because the ice is buoyant,

Colgan said. We found that the ice isnt really bearingany weight. Its oating.Also of note was that water drains slowly in the months

after the melt season, keeping the base water table high,around 80 percent of the ice sheets total thickness,where it will be built upon the next year.Theres little concern, however, that the ice sheet

could suddenly skate to the sea during peak meltseason, due to the added water pressure below. The

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calving of the ice as a result of this additional movementis not that signicant in the grand scheme of things, saidColgan.

Warming the iceIce sheets are feeling the heat from within as meltwater

owing through them carries warmth to the interior viacrevasses, fractures, and moulins. A new modeling studyshows that such warming can greatly accelerate the thermalresponse of an ice sheet to climate change.CIRES postdoctoral researcher Thomas Phillips, Harihar

Rajaram of CU-Boulder, and CIRES Director Konrad Steffenworked with models supported by physical data and foundthat an ice sheet can respond by warming on the order ofdecades, rather than the centuries projected by conven-tional thermal models.We are nding that once such water ow is initiated

through a new section of ice sheet, it can warm rathersignicantly and quickly, sometimes in just 10 years, saidlead author Phillips. Weve termed this process cryo-hydrologic warming.Ice ows more readily as it warms, the newly named

mechanism means that a warming climate can increaseice ows much faster than previously thought. It will stilltake thousands of years for the ice sheet to disappear, saidSteffen.

Lake MoulinWater collects inlakes on the icesurface, only toempty into the icesheet in a singleepisodic event viaa moulin drain.

River MoulinThe more commonform of moulin,these large drainsact as speedy andsteady conduits formeltwater into theice sheet.

LubricatingWater LayerPressurized waterunderneath theice sheet allowsthe ice to float andreduces frictionwith the ground,making it easier forthe ice sheet to sliptowards the sea.

Ice Sheet SurfaceThe ice sheets surface is riddledwith moulins, crevasses, and rivers.

Water TableThe water tableinside the ice sheetfluctuates around aheight of about 80percent of the icesheets thickness.

Brian Clark/CIRES


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With a click and release, a small white andorange-tipped plane lifted off from the roof of a truck

racing down an icy runway. With barely a wobble,the unmanned aircraft swooped into the white skyabove the Antarctic, launched by researchers onthe ground. For the duration of its ight, the roboticplane would be largely on its own as it collecteddata from such hard-to-reach and extreme environ-ments as Antarctica.This unmanned aircraft logged a series of record-

setting research ights in its tenure in Antarctica in2009, providing CIRES researchers and colleagueswith some of the rst three-dimensional observa-

tions of gaping holes in the Antarctic sea ice, knownas polynyas, and the blasting winds that help formthem.These were some of the longest ights on record

for scientic applications, and certainly the longestin Antarctica, said CU-Boulder Research Professor

James Maslanik.Using unmanned planes roughly 9 feet across,

Maslanik and CIRES Fellow and Associate ProfessorJohn Cassano gained a unique glimpse into the TerraNova Bay polynya, a stretch of open water that attimes yawns 2,000 square miles in area, nearly twice

the size of Rhode Island.

Unmanned aircraft

take hardiness toAntarctic extremes

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An unmanned plane takes off from the top ofa truck during a research trip in Antarctica in 2009.The small unmanned aircraft helped CIRES researchersand colleagues observe the global climate effect ofpolynyas (above), gaping holes in Antarctic sea ice.

The goal of the Antarctic mission was to measuremoisture and heat exchanges between the ocean and

atmosphere and to eventually unravel the effect ofpolynyas on global climate, Cassano said.In polar regions, sea ice often reduces interactions

between the ocean and atmosphere, but in polynyas,open water persists even in the heart of winter, hesaid. Its in these areas that large amounts of heatand moisture are lost from the ocean to the atmo-sphere. Instruments aboard the unmanned planeshave provided some of the rst direct measurementsof this heat loss in winter.Polynyas can affect global currents, Cassano said,

as the cold and salty waters left exposed sink and in-teract with the oceanic conveyer belt a phenom-enon known as the thermohaline circulation, whichmoves seawater around the globe through changes insalinity and water temperature. In places where thethermohaline circulation emerges at the ocean sur-face, it substantially inuences weather and climate.The unmanned aircraft also measured airow, to

help researchers understand the interaction betweenthe polynya and the severe winds that whip over theAntarctic continent. The constant blasting of thesewinds, called katabatic winds, helps keep the Terra

Nova Bay polynya free of new sea ice and openthroughout the winter, said Cassano. He said he sus-pects the polynya inuences local wind patterns bycreating a low pressure area that can spin off smallbut intense cyclones.Cassano and his colleagues are currently analyzing

data collected during the Antarctic mission.There have been a lot of models and theory-based

studies describing polynyas and their climate feed-backs, Cassano said, but we cant fully understandthem until we measure them.

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The coolestmember of the

data familyNASAs Distributed Active

Archive Center (DAAC)

collects, archives, and shares

data on the cryosphere

Akin to an army of diligent scribes, the data centersof NASAs Earth Observing System Data and Informa-tion System (EOSDIS) record and order informationabout the planet, 24-7.This family of information

gatherers collect and collateinformation from the polar-orbiting satellites about theEarths land surface, thebiosphere, the atmosphereand the oceans, creating

a foundation scientistsaround the world can useto improve their knowl-edge of the planet. Onemember of that family, theDistributed Active ArchiveCenter (DAAC) based atCIRES National Snow andIce Data Center (NSIDC),chronicles the story of thecryosphere.

DAAC keeps tabs onchanges in glacier velocityin Alaska, ice-sheet eleva-tion in Antarctica, and theextent and mass of Arctic sea ice, among other things.Operation IceBridge, for example, collects airborneremote-sensing measurements and combines themwith ground-based observations to depict rapidlychanging portions of land and sea ice in polar regions.The ice sheets arent standing still, they are chang-

ing, said DAAC manager Ron Weaver of NSIDC.They are changing much faster than what the com-

mon opinion was in the 90s, before we had the rstIceSAT satellite.One of the things that the data center does is reveal

how scientists do their work, said Weaver. At DAAC,researchers not only provide data, they detail thealgorithms used in processing scientic information.These are then archived and made available to otherscientists.

The ice sheets

arent stand-

ing still, they

are changing . . .

much faster

than what the

common opinion

was in the 90s.

Ron Weaver, NSIDC,

DAAC manager


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A birds-eye perspectiveWhen it comes to looking at changes inglaciers and sea ice, Waleed Abdalati, Directorof the CIRES Earth Science and Observation

Center (ESOC) doesnt just visit the Earths chillier

regions, he uses satellites to inform his research.

Abdalati believes these satellite and airborneremote-sensing technologies are essential to

understanding and anticipating how the Earth, and its climate, are

changing. In particular, he has used satellite data in his research

on understanding glaciers and ice sheets. The process of looking at

Earth using satellite and aerial data is termed remote sensing.


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on the planetCan you explain why it is so impor-tant to use remote sensing for look-ing at the Earths environment?Remote sensing is observing a

medium or a process without evercoming in direct contact with thatphenomenon. When you are lookingfrom space, when you are lookingfrom 400-500 miles away, or in some

cases thousands or twenty thousandmiles away, you get a really differentperspective.We can use remote sensing to better

understand our planet as a system,which without the context, perspec-tive, and the scale of observations thatremote sensing provides, is really verydifcult, if not impossible.

How has remote sensinginformed your research?In my own discipline of under-

standing ice cover, I think remotesensing has literally rewritten thetextbooks of how ice behavesand how it changes. For example,

just by watching, taking picturesfrom space, we have been able to

observe very, very rapid changes inGreenland and Antarctic ice cover.We used to think the enormous icesheets responded slowly to climate,and that is only partially true. Weare still seeing the effects of climatechange thousands and thousandsof years ago being expressed intodays ice cover, but what remote

sensing has revealed is that thereare also changes on the scales ofhours and days. These big ice beasts

are not sluggish at all; they are verydynamic, very active.

Is the same true in otherresearch disciplines?Remote-sensing observations

from space also tell us how healthyforests are and what kinds ofvegetation or land cover typesexist. We can track urban sprawl,the movement of population types

from one place to the other, andthe genesis and decay and theintervening trajectory of hurricanes,for example. All these observationshave very real world applicationsto weather, to longer-term climate,and to the distribution and behaviorof life on Earth.

What other challenges facethe remote-sensing communityright now?

The challenge facing the scien-tic community right now is reallythe loss or reduction of our assetsin space. Of the 14 NASA Earth-observing system satellites launchedover the last decade that are stilloperating, 13 are past their expecteddesign lives.The Earth is changing in remark-

able and dramatic ways that willaffect our lives. Just as we are real-

izing how and why these changesare occurring, our technical abilityto observe and understand them isdiminishing. Frankly our success, inthe future, as a society is intimatelylinked to our ability to anticipatewhat is coming. That ability isbecoming compromised at a timewhen we need it most.

NASA

NASA appointmentNASA Administrator Charles

F. Bolden selected CIRESFellow Waleed Abdalatito serve as NASAs ChiefScientist starting in January

2011. During his two-yearappointment with NASA,Abdalati will advocate forthe agencys science whileretaining his facultyappointment at CU-Boulder.


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Since the 1960s, scientists have used naturalisotopes versions of the same atom thatvary slightly in weight as scientic nger-prints. Carbon isotopes help archeologists dateancient human remains, for example. And inice cores extracted from layers of compactedsnow, oxygen and hydrogen isotopes havelong been understood to speak to the tempera-ture at the time.

We know thats kind of right, in ageneralsense, says CIRES Fellow and AssociateProfessor DavidNoone, emphasizingthe adjectives. But itcould be that isotopessay as much aboutpatterns of sea ice orclouds as temperature,Noone said. Nobodyhas checked this withmodern techniques.

So hes about to.With a four-year,$2-million grant fromthe National ScienceFoundation, Noone

and his colleagues will set up a unique com-bination of advanced, laser-based instrumentsin Summit, Greenland; Reykjavik, Iceland;and Eureka, Canada. They plan to track howvarious factors evaporation from oceans,creation of clouds, patterns of moist air move-

ments, the settling of snow into compactedlayers, and temperature affect isotopes inthe snow layers.If Noones team can unravel those factors

and how they create isotopic signatures inGreenland snow, then other scientists will beable to use the results to extract more informa-tion about past climates. Perhaps ice core data which Noone calls underutilized willhelp climate researchers better understandchanging patterns of cloudiness and sea-icecover in the Arctic, as well as temperature.The project could ll in the picture much

as corrective lenses can help a near-sightedperson see more than just the broad outlineof a distant tree, Noone said. With glasses,branches and leaves suddenly appear. Andtheres a chance, he said, that when we holdup our lens well discover Oh, its a shrub! orThats twotrees.

14

TheScience

Climate clues

locked in icy

isotopes could

give researchers

a high-denition

view of Arctic

climate.

Ice core isotopesmay reveal more

than temperature

Tracking Europes

weather machineGreenland Climate Network (GC-

Net) will leap into public servicein 2011, providing up-to-the-hourweather and ice-sheet informationto the Danish ofce of the WorldMeteorological Organization. Thedata provided by the weather stationsdeployed on the Greenlands Ice Sheetshould boost Europes weather predic-tion capabilities.The Greenland Ice Sheet is the

weather machine for Europe, saidCIRES Director Konrad Steffen. Anychanges of circulation in Greenland,such as cyclone frequency, have alarge effect on weather in Central andNorthern Europe.To improve predictions, weather

forecasters need more accurate pres-sure readings, temperature, and windvelocity information. The GC-Netprovides this basic information on

time to be part of an hourly worldwidedistribution of standard meteorologydata, said Steffen.These forecasts will also be helpful

closer to home, he said. GC-Net willimprove local forecasts for Greenland,which are essential for transport andthe shing industry.


17/2815

The intimidating vastness of the Green-

land Ice Sheet is a familiar backyard to

CIRES Director Konrad Steen. He has

amassed more than 20 years of meteoro-

logical and glaciological data as part of the

Greenland Climate Network, or GC-Net, a

series of automated weather stations track-

ing changes in Arctic conditions.

The project stands poised to enter a new

phase of research, providing more com-plete weather information to the World

Meteorological Organization (WMO) in

Geneva, and the Danish Meteorological

Institute (see sidebar on p. 14). Already, the

long-running and extensive datasets are

revealing some surprising trends about the

polar climate: Steen and his colleagues

have shown that polar regions are respond-

ing much faster to climate change than

expected.

Since 2000, Greenlands ice sheet has

gone from losing 50 gigatons of ice per yearto 250 a year, says Steen. Thats two

times all the ice in the European Alps.

This rapid response to warming is largely

due to the ice sheets albedo the surfacesability to reect light says Steen. Melt-ing snow is not as bright as fresh snow, so it

absorbs more energy and becomes warmer.

The resulting darker meltwater also absorbs

more light, so overall, more ice melts into

water and runs into the ocean. By scientists

calculations, Greenlands ice loss (abouthalf from melt, half from iceberg calving)

accounts for about 30 percent of the global

sea-level rise originating from ice.

Steen expects the meltwater trend to

continue in the coming years. We were

able to detect a two-degreeCelsius (almost

four-degree-Fahrenheit) increase in mean

temperature per decade at Swiss Camp,

which is huge, says Steen.

Current weather and climate models are

not very good at picking up the increase in

ice loss from melting and iceberg calving,but data collected by GC-Net are likely to

help. Each of 18 stations currently active

around the ice sheet collects a host of infor-

mation, including temperature, humidity,

wind velocity, solar and Earth radiation, and

ice-sheet elevation, beamed back hourly

via satellite to Steens oce in Boulder,

Greenlands ice sheet

real-time, real fast

Photos/Konrad Steffen

Swiss Camp on the Greenland Ice Sheet in1990, and then during the snowy year of 1995.Natural variability imposes ups and downs insnow levels and temperatures, but overall, itsgetting warmer.

Colorado. The data ultimately become

available to other researchers, and provide a

high-resolution dataset to compare against

regional models used to project future

changes. To understand changing seasonsand forcing, we need higher-resolution

data, which is provided by GC-Net.

Beaming data back by satellites requires

a substantial eort: Steen and his team

travel once a year to Greenland to check

on some of the stations personally. The re-

searchers have endured white-out blizzards,

rebuilt collapsed camps, and perfected their

extreme environment electronic skills

all to bring back the data thats providing

the most intimate view yet of Greenlands

changing climate.

Its worth it, says Steen. This kind of

long-term monitoring in polar regions is

crucial to understanding how the ice sheet

is responding to rising temperatures and

changes in precipitation.

This project is sponsored by NASA and the

National Science Foundation.


18/2816

to detect features such as the margins of the sea icecover in the Arctic and Antarctic. Computer processingpower was too weak to support much experimentation.

But in 2007, John Moses at theNASA Goddard Earth Science Dataand Information Service began re-covery of 45-year-old digital satellitedata from the Nimbus Polar orbiter.NSIDC scientist Walt Meier and proj-ect manager David Gallaher heard

about the work, and they wonderedif this early NASA satellite data mightalso yield information about sea iceconditions before 1979.The window of opportunity for

recovering the old data was closingrapidly. Only the third-generation

copy of the digital infrared data still existed along with asingle copy of the Nimbus visible light lms. In addition,

Scientists today who study polar sea ice conditionsrely on satellite records reaching back to 1979. ButCIRES researchers in the National Snow and Ice DataCenter (NSIDC) are learning to extendtheir understanding of Earths polesby sifting through some of the oldestEarth-observing satellite data for newinformation.This irreplaceable data has relevance

to climate change and should be saved

as a part of the climate data record,the NSIDC-led team concluded duringan Innovative Research Program (IRP)poster presentation at CIRES in Novem-ber 2010 (the original research wasfunded by CIRES IRP).When NASA launched the Nimbus

satellites in the 1960s, primarily to make twice daily,global, meteorological observations, no methods existed

Nimbus II HRIRGoogle Earth image,September 23, 1966.Note the coolertemperatures of theHimalayan Plateau,the warm waters ofthe Gulf of Tonkinand typhoons Ida andHelen.

Not forgottenCIRES scientists extract sea-ice data from aging records

TheScience

Decades-old satellite

images can be

reprocessed to extend

the scientic record ofArctic sea ice extent and

understanding of climate

changes in the region.

-60 -50 -40 -30 -20 -10 0 10 20 30 40 50


19/2817

the original Nimbus researchers were now in their late70s and 80s, and contact with them would be criticalto answering some instrumentation questions. Theserecovered data could be valuable to other Earth scienceresearchers as well.Meier and Gallaher worked with Dennis Wingo at

NASAs Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project to read

and reprocess old Nimbus satellite images, removingerrors resulting from the limits of the original processing.Wingo and his staff are experienced in reprocessing olddigital data, having recently recovered stunning lunarimages from the 1960s. The team nally managed to ex-tract a global infrared image, captured in late Septemberof 1966, at higher resolution than seen before. Thats thetime of year when Arctic sea ice would normally havebeen reaching its end-of-season minimum extent.

Much work remains: the researchers seek to reprocess5000+ Nimbus I, II, and III half-orbit records, developpost-processing algorithms to improve quality, and willthen need to painstakingly compare images to separateclouds from ice.NOAAs Climate Data Modernization Program may get

involved in scanning the 200,000+ visible light images

acquired by the early Nimbus missions, which are vital,along with the infrared data, in determining sea iceextent.It could be well worth it: Success extracting the polar

monthly sea ice extents for the years 1962-1978 (fromNimbus and other satellite data) would mean adding16 years of data to a critical climate dataset of 32 years,today an extension of 50 percent.Story courtesy of NSIDC.

Original (top) and reprocessed (bottom) images of Earth. NASA


20/2818

Goodbye, ice hello, snow and rain

Two factors could be playing a part in this unex-pected result, Stroeve said. Potentially, the loss of seaice could be driving circulation changes, making forstronger North Atlantic storm tracks that are dumpingmore precipitation in the region, she said. Or it sim-

ply could be too early to detect an emerging patternbetween sea ice loss and more precipitation. Thesereally large open water areas have only just recentlyhappened, she said. So the time period for a robustsignal is relatively short.Stroeve plans to continue investigating the relation-

ship between sea ice and regional precipitation withclimate models. We hope to get at causation byusing models, Stroeve said. With models we canisolate the atmospheric and terrestrial response todepleted Arctic sea ice.

The Arctic Ocean is losing its sea-ice blanket, but notits rain or snow. In fact, autumn precipitation is on therise, says Julienne Stroeve of CIRES National Snow andIce Data Center.Stroeve is trying to understand how thawing Arctic

sea ice impacts the Northern Hemisphere climate. Asthe air becomes warmer and moister from that thawing,cyclones might become more frequent and intense, shesays, which could make for more rain or, in the coldermonths, snow.To test both theories, Stroeve used a sophisticated

computer program created by NSIDC Director and

CIRES Fellow Mark Serreze to track down cyclones. Intothis program, she fed reanalysis data values (see sidebarat right) for sea-level pressure. The program used thedata to identify when and where cyclones had occurredin the region from 1979 to 2008. Then, Stroeve thenlooked again at the reanalysis data to see the levels ofrain and snow that accompanied the cyclones.Applied over the Arctic Ocean, the program predicts that

cyclones will become both more intense and frequent,leading to autumn downpours or snowy showers. An in-crease in cyclone intensity would be no surprise, Stroeve

said, as the water-heavy atmosphere is ripe for the cy-clones. You just have more energy for storms, she said.The program, however, output something unexpected:

While there was a total precipitation increase for theentire region, a large proportion of this precipitationcame from the North Atlantic region a region that isalways ice-free. When you look at the spatial patternsof where the increased precipitation is happening, it isnot exactly where you would expect it to be, Stroevesaid. So that leaves you unable to conclusively attri-bute it to reduced sea-ice extent.

Model predicts increasing autumn precipitation for Arctic Ocean

These really large open water areas

have only just recently happened. So

the time period for a robust signal is

relatively short. Julienne Stroeve

In reanalysis, weather and climate research-

ers reconstruct past weather conditions on

Earth, starting with incomplete observa-

tions. Reanalysis datasets combine real,

historic observations with modern numeri-

cal weather forecast models that incorpo-

rate understanding of how the atmosphere

works. The technique allows researchers to

hindcast historical conditions for locations

where no observations were taken.

Reanalysis


21/2821

Huddled around a monitor in her laboratory, MargaretTolbert and two of her graduate students stare intently at a

white screen lled with a bunch of black specks, waiting.A machine pumps water vapor into the sample. Then,

as if by magic, little spears of translucent material sproutfrom a particularly large speck in the lower right-handcorner of the screen. Look, there one goes! saysTolbert, Distinguished Professor and CIRES Fellow.And just like that, an ice crystal is born.By studying ice formation at this tiniest of scales, Tolbert

seeks to understand a much bigger phenomenon: cirrusclouds, which affect climate. Clouds are one of the larg-est uncertainties for climate predictions, said Tolbert.

Airplane contrails, fossil fuel emissions, and biomassburning all create particles that can seed the formationof these wispy, ice-laden heat-trapping clouds. Thosehuman activities are changing while cirrus cloudsonly occupy 3 percent of busy yways now, by 2050,scientists expect that number to be closer to 20 percent.So Tolbert and her colleagues are scrutinizing the basicprocesses that form the clouds, to better understand theinuence of human activities.Clouds are made up of thousands and thousands of ice

crystals. Yet, in a batch of particles, ice will only form on

one out of every 10,000.Tolbert and her team want

to nd out what makes theone particle in a batch so ice-worthy.To do that, Tolbert and her graduate students coat tiny

discs with lab-grown versions of air particles found inthe tropical tropopause a cirrus cloud-laden stretchof atmosphere about 12 miles above the tropics. Theteam then creates pockets of tropical tropopause-likeatmosphere in the lab, so they can subject the particlesto conditions of temperature, pressure, and water vaporthat lead to ice formation.

Then, they wait to see which one will be the most at-tractive for ice formation.Size, chemical content, and physique inuence why

one particle gets the ice crystal and others dont. Largerinorganic particles, for example a speck of soil dust withlots of rough edges, seem to make primo ice surfaces,Tolbert found.Not only that, but once one particle grows ice, the rest

are out of luck. Chances are, all the ingredients havebeen used up, says Tolbert. Its like rst come, onlyserved.

Student Focus:Kelly BaustianAfter investigating what makes a lab-generated particle

conducive to ice formation, scientists are turning theirattention to particles collected directly from the environ-ment.Kelly Baustian, a graduate student with Distinguished

Professor and CIRES Fellow Margaret Tolberts group,

collected particle samples at the Desert ResearchInstitutes Storm Peak Laboratory in Steamboat Springs,Colorado, in January 2010, to nd out which particleslend themselves to ice cloud formation in nature.Samples of particles collected from the great outdoors

were brought back to the lab and put through pacessimilar to their laboratory-generated counterparts.During preliminary work, Baustian observed that, just

as with lab-generated particles, ice will only form on cer-tain ones. Analysis of chemical and physical compositionwill help suss out what makes one particle so ice-friendly

and others not, the researchers expect, and results can becompared with those from laboratory-generated samples.These results could help researchers better understand

how airborne particles, such as those emitted from facto-ries or airplanes, can lead to the formation of ice crystalsthat make up climate-warming cirrus clouds.Working with these samples has given me a new ap-

preciation for the complexity of our atmosphere, saidBaustian, and how susceptible it is to human alteration.

An ice crystal is born

Kelly Baustian earned a Graduate Student

Research Fellowship to support her work.

CIRES oers graduate

student fellowships.

Visit our website

to learn more.

Learnmore

about CIRES fellowships atcires.colorado.edu/education.

A new ice crystal

19


22/2820

The most striking feature of Asias Himalaya Moun-tains their breathtaking height makes Himalayanglaciers far less vulnerable to melting than their lower-elevation counterparts.Its cold at 18,000 feet and above. Really cold. All the

time.That may seem perfectly obvious, said CIRES Fellow

Richard Armstrong, but the basic facts appear to haveeluded many people.We have all heard these stories about how Hima-

layan glaciers are melting faster than anywhere else,drinking water is disappearing, there will be wide-spread catastrophic oods, etc. . . . said Armstrong,a glaciologist at CIRES National Snow and Ice DataCenter. Well, when you start looking, theres really nodata to support those statements.A couple of years ago, when a colleague of his was

approached by the World Bank, Armstrong agreed tohelp search for data from Himalayan glaciers, to assess

the veracity of water resource fears.The World Bank is approached by people wanting

to borrow money to build dams, and they wanted toknow if theres going to be any water left to ll them.Armstrong said.So Armstrong and his colleagues set about trying to

estimate, for a remote and difcult-to-access region,how much streamow came from glacial melt as op-posed to monsoon rains and the melt of the seasonalsnow cover.

We thought this work would be a literature search,Armstrong said. But we couldnt nd any real re-search in this area.What his team did nd in the literature were plenty

of big numbers. Glacier termini were retreating 10 to60 m a year. There were estimates that glacial meltprovides 50, 60, 70 percent of the ow of the Ganges.It sounded quite dire, but the researchers knew

rst that termini measurements are not the last word

A case study from the Nepal Himalaya shows no melt over

large areas, and relatively small contribution to streamow

Highest-elevation glaciers


23/2821

on glacial melt, especially at the higher elevations.Termini can retreat even when glaciers are gaining

mass overall, through snowfall at higher elevations.Moreover, the streamow estimates had no robustcalculations to support them.So the team began looking for raw

data. Little or no data were availableacross much of the Himalaya, butthe team identied nine basins inNepal that contained digital glaciermaps, stream gauge data, and theavailability of NASAs Shuttle RadarTopography Mission so high-quality digital elevation data wereavailable.We got everything we needed,

thanks to the collaboration and co-operation of various institutions in Nepal, Armstrongsaid.After developing a method to estimate the current

mass balance on the Nepalese glaciers, one that tookinto consideration their high elevations, the team

reached two key conclusions: 1) Glacial melt contrib-utes from 2 to 20 percent of the streamow in the ba-

sins studied, much lower than anecdotally estimated,and 2) More than 50 percent of the surface area of theNepalese glaciers never melts at all,during any time of year.Globally, the prognosis for glaciers

is dismal, said Armstrong. He spentyears studying glaciers in the moun-tains of Washington State, where manyglaciers are currently retreating andmelting rapidly. Theres little doubtthat glaciers in many locations acrossNorth America and the European Alpsare melting, and that the same is truethroughout the world at elevationsbelow 14,000 feet.

But the glaciers of the Himalaya at elevations of18,000 feet and above are holding their own quitewell, Armstrong said. Its a bit simple, but the situa-tion changes when you go up, when youre at eleva-tions that the rest of the world doesnt see.

keep their cool

TheScience

Himalayan glaciers

resist melt across 50

percent of their surface,

and contribute much

less to streamow thanassumed.

iStockphoto


24/28

As ground, previously frozen for millennia, begins tothaw out in warmer temperatures, it will unleash vastquantities of carbon into the atmosphere, further con-founding attempts to slow down global warming.The amount of carbon we are talking about is

equivalent to half the amount of carbon released into theatmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Age, saidCIRES scientist Kevin Schaefer, with the National Snowand Ice Data Center (NSIDC) who is looking at the effectof a thawing Arctic on climate. That is a lot of carbon.The carbon from the frozen ground known as per-

mafrost will make its impact not only on the climate,but also on international strategies to reduce globalwarming, Schaefer said. If we want to hit a target carbonconcentration, then we have to reduce fossil fuel emis-sions even lower than previously calculated to accountfor the additional carbon from permafrost, Schaefer said.

Frozen carbon bombThawing frozen groundwill unleash yet morecarbon into atmosphere

Otherwise we will end up with a warmer Earth than we

want.The carbon comes from decaying plant and animal

material entombed in soil thousands of years ago.Once the ground froze, in the Ice Age of the Pleisto-cene, it trapped and preserved the decaying biomass.Schaefer equates the mechanism to the freezing ofbroccoli in a home freezer: As long as it stays frozen,it stays stable, he said. But you take it out of thefreezer and you put it in the refrigerator, and it willthaw out and decay.Now, a warming climate is thawing out the frozen

ground and the biomass will start to decay, releasingcarbon into the atmosphere like any other decomposingplant material, Schaefer said.To predict just how much carbon will enter the atmo-

sphere and when, Schaefer and CIRES Fellow TingjunZhang (also part of the NSIDC) modeled the thaw anddecay of organic matter currently frozen in permafrostunder potential future warming conditions as predictedby the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.They found that between one-third and two-thirds of

permafrost will disappear by 2200. The reason it takes

Tim Schaefer, Lin Liu, andTingjun Zhang drilling apermafrost core samplenear Deadhorse, Alaska.

22


25/28

is ticking

so long is because basically you are talking about melt-ing a huge block of ice, Schaefer said.The scientists used the model to predict how much

carbon the thawing will release. They estimate an extra190 64 gigatons of carbon will enter the atmosphereby 2200 about one-fth the total amount of carboncurrently in the atmosphere today. Carbon emissionsfrom thawing permafrost will require greater reductionsin fossil fuel emissions to limit the atmospheric carbondioxide. It means the problem is getting more and moredifcult all the time, said Schaefer. It is hard enoughto reduce fossil fuel emissions in any case, but now wesaying that we have to reduce it even more.

TheScience

One-third to two-thirds of permafrost

will disappear by 2200, according to a

new estimate. That thaw could thwart

peoples eorts to limit greenhouse gas

concentrations in the atmosphere.

23

CIRES Director Konrad Steen and

Fellow Tingjun Zhang will be lead

authors on the cryosphere chapter.

The Intergovernmental Panel on

Climate Change selected several

CIRES researchers to serve as lead

authors for the 5th Assessment

Report, due in 2013-2014.

Scientists to author5th Assessment Report

CIRES senior

scientist JudithPerlwitz will be a

lead author of a

chapter on detect-

ing and attributing

climate change.

CIRES Fellow

Steve Nerem willbe lead author of a

new chapter on

sea-level change.

Aliated with

CIRES, NCAR

researcher Jean-

Francois Lamarquewill be lead author

on a chapter on

anthropogenic and

natural radiative

forcing.


26/28

MySphere

In 2009, the steel posts that had supported a platformwith three insulated tents, six skidoos, and other equip-ment for over 20 years collapsed.

A major loss was the six-person sauna, for bathing andwarming up. Steffen said he hopes to rebuild in 2011 there wasnt time in 2010. The science came rst,he said, and we had so many things to do.

When snow blocked the saunas more accessibleentrance, researchers and visitors climbed throughthe roof hatch.

How people work,

research, and relax at CIRES

1

2

3

4 5

1

2

3

24

10


27/28

Swiss Camp

Swiss Camp supported three tents, with 8-inch-thick wallsmade from layers of insulation and fabric. One served asbunkhouse, another as a work tent with computers andother equipment, and a third as kitchen. In the kitchen tent,Steffen dished up dinner for the then-Speaker of the Houseduring a visit in 2007.

Wind shredded several layers of the kitchen tent sometimebetween late 2007 and early 2008. A Rolling Stonereporteron his way to Swiss Camp brought in the blue tarp as atemporary x.

Instrument tower for climate measurements.

Skidoo fuel.

Melting ice left a pool of water under

the Swiss Camp in 2009. Snow levelsat Swiss Camp are dropping, throughsome years, it still snows enough toblock doors.

Propane for cooking and heating.

Spare generator fuel.

6

7

8

4

5

6

7

8

Photos/Konrad Steffen

CIRES Director Konrad Steffen has conducted re-

search and maintained a station on the Greenland

Ice Sheet since 1990. He and his colleagues lived

and worked in roughly the same setup three

insulated tents and a plywood sauna for more

than two decades.

In 2009, much of the station collapsed when thick

steel supports finally buckled. In the summer of

2009, Steffen and his colleagues spent two extra

weeks in Greenland, rebuilding.

Two new insulated tents (11) now support science

work and a kitchen, and the bunk tent has been

replaced with old-school but reliable Scott Tents

from England (12). One or two people can sleep in

each canvas tent, where the temperature typically

hovers about minus 20 degrees Celsius.

Thats a good temperature for sleeping, Steffen

said. If you want to, you bring in a bottle with hot

water from the kitchen to warm up.

Electricity from solar panels and a wind turbine

(13) power all electrical equipment at Swiss Camp.

25

10

9

9

11

12

13


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The Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences is a research

institute dedicated to better understanding the Earth system. Our research

is essential for understanding the processes and feedbacks in many Earth

science disciplines, and to foster cross-disciplinary understanding of the

cryosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, geosphere, and hydrosphere. CIRES

scientists are identifying and quantifying changes in a warming climate,

providing baseline data against which to measure change, and informing thepublic and the policy makers about these changes.

CIRES is a cooperative institute of the University of Colorado at Boulder and

the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Konrad Steffen, Ph.D

CIRES Director

[email protected]

Brian ClarkCommunications Coordinator

[email protected]

Suzanne van Drunick, Ph.D

Associate Director for Science

[email protected]

Jane Palmer, Ph.DScience News Writer

[email protected]

http://cires.colorado.edu twitter.com/theCIRESwire

DONATE TO CIRESInvest in the future of our planet.The Earth is changing at anunprecedented rate. To ensure the planets sustainability andbiodiversity, it is vital to understand and anticipate these changes.CIRES has been at the forefront of environmental research for morethan 40 years delivering the knowledge critical for decision making.

Sea level could rise between 0.5 to 1.0 m by 2100 and will displace5-200 million people from their homes. How you can make adifference? Visit http://cires.colorado.edu/donate/ to learn more.

Documents

2011 Snow Ice Edition