For the first time in nearly two years I’m back at the Oliktok Point observational site. In many ways, not much has changed – the oilfield is as busy as ever, and other than a few instruments having moved away from the facility, the site looks more or less the same. A bit of background on this – the US Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program runs one of its “mobile facilities” at Oliktok Point. This system, despite its name, is a very significant cluster of sea containers filled with various instruments. From here, measurements of the atmosphere, its clouds, the particles that float around in it, and the surface around the site are made. This location has been the site of the AMF-3 (ARM Mobile Facility 3) for nearly 5 years now, and the dataset that has been collected has already helped us to answer several questions related to how clouds and aerosols interact, and how this part of northern Alaska is similar (or different) to the area around Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow) where ARM has been making measurements for nearly 20 years now.
The view from the roof of the AMF-3.
After a fairly uneventful flight and drive up here, I had lunch and drove over the AMF-3. After only about 30 minutes on site, we got a radio call that a bear had been spotted just to the west of the AMF! Admittedly, I had never seen a polar bear in the wild before, so it was exciting to see one making its way across the tundra. As it continued to move past the AMF-3, we tracked its movements carefully in order to not be surprised by a bear in close proximity to our shelters. While the first 15-20 minutes of the bear’s presence were exciting and interesting, its desire to stick around (it is still outside, after an hour and a half) quickly became a challenge, as it meant that we would not be able to be outside to launch the tethered balloon system and make measurements this afternoon. Given that the weather is absolutely perfect (calm, sunny, relatively warm), that is a bummer. I guess the bears are taking advantage of it as much as we would have liked to! For the time being, we just have to hope that the bears go somewhere else so that we can fly the balloon tomorrow and get the data that we’re here to collect as part of POPEYE.
Just another day in the office at the AMF-3…
On the SODA side, we’re still looking for a chase airplane. There are several different leads being pursued and I remain optimistic that a solution will be found. At the same time, we’re starting to eat into the timeframe that had been defined for our science campaign, which is unfortunate. But, we have a little over a month until the end of the campaign, and the most interesting stuff related to ice formation is not yet in full swing. In sharp contrast to our trip two years ago, there are already some chunks of ice floating in the near-shore water, and the ponds are starting to show signs of freezing up. So winter is coming, and we’re still aiming to measure that stark transition over the next few weeks!
