 All right, thank you Lorena for the introduction and thank you everybody for coming tonight I'm glad to see there's so much interest in Antarctica It's a place that certainly not a lot of people actually get to experience I mean anytime people find out that I've been to Antarctica the first question is always what was it like? So that is one of the things that I'll be talking to you about tonight As well as talking about the project that I had going on down there What it takes to actually get to Antarctica? What life is like around Antarctica and things like that? I first want to start off and just give a thanks to some of the people that are involved with this project Primarily mark Sefelt who is my collaborator at the University of Colorado? The Unavco group is another organization here in Boulder and they were the ones that provided a lot of the support for the project A lot of what we did wouldn't have been possible without the Unavco group I'm also going to call out Carol Costanza with the University of Wisconsin Who was down there at the same time as we were and really helped out with a lot of the installation and stuff? And you'll see some of the pictures as we were going through that Doing these installations and finally the National Science Foundation and really the McMurdo station staff I'll talk a little bit more about what it's like at McMurdo and how the station actually runs But it's truly amazing to think that McMurdo is actually a station that is fully manned by NSF with people doing everything from taking care of electricity to plumbing to carpenters to maintaining vehicles Everything like that So a big thanks to all of those organizations who made this possible So I want to start off and ask for a show of hands How many people have ever awakened in the morning thinking that the weather was supposed to be nice because you heard it from the Weatherman on TV and you got dressed and you walked out the front door to this Nobody's ever seen this happen, right? Never Well, there's two reasons. I will tell you why that sort of thing happens The first is kind of a special reason that a lot of people don't actually know about When meteorologists get their degree, we actually get a secondary degree in professional lying Actually, that's what my mother thinks that that's not actually true One of the reasons that we oftentimes struggle when it comes to actual forecasts We look at weather models. We have that information available to us as meteorologists and the weather models sometimes they nail it Sometimes they don't And one of the reasons that they don't nail it Is primarily because sometimes we don't have a good understanding of some of the things that we're actually trying to forecast Snowfall being one of those things Now why measure snowfall? I get this question from people a lot of time. There's two different methods for measuring Snowfall there's one method that most of you are probably the most familiar with Well, you take a ruler you go outside you stick it in the snow and you figure out how many inches of snow you had If you cheat you go over to the biggest snow depth bank and stick the ruler in there and try to beat out your neighbor saying Yeah, I got two more feet than you did As scientists we're actually not as interested in snow depth Really what we're more interested in is how much water is actually frozen in those snowflakes If you think about it all of you here tonight have clearly experienced snow here in Colorado This last snowstorm that we got if you went out and shoveled it the snow was pretty light Relatively easy to move around as we start getting a little bit later into the spring Snow is going to start getting wetter. We're going to start getting more into our concrete snow type of season There's gonna be a lot more hospital visits from people breaking their backs trying to shovel all the snow off of their driveway So from our perspective when we're actually looking at snowfall amounts We want to know how much snow has tied up in there because for water budgets For knowing how much water we're going to have available for drinking water and stuff like that We want to know how much water is actually tied up in that snow So snow depth to us Actually isn't important what we're really interested is what we call the liquid water equivalent Which is just a fancy term for how much water is actually in the snow So before we get into the whole Antarctic project I want to talk a little bit about snowfall measurement basics And give you a little bit better understanding of what it is that we do for snowfall how we do it Because this will be my lead in then to tell you how it was that I actually was able to go down to Antarctica Rain falls at approximately 30 feet per second It's a lot more dense than snow It's a lot harder for rain to blow around unless you're in a hurricane Snow on the other hand falls at three feet per second a factor lower than rainfall measurement is And because of that it's obviously a lot more easily influenced by wind The stronger the winds the more horizontal the snow is going to blow the harder it is to actually capture the snow so How do we actually capture the snow? One of the primary things that we have been using over the years On many of our projects is the odd hydromet pluvio-2 gauge Sounds very fancy. I've got one right up here in front of the podiums So you can actually get a true idea of what the size of one of these looks like The idea behind this is actually very simple. There's a bucket inside which you can see over on the right hand side So the snow will fall into the bucket and underneath the bucket is really just a mass balance So the bucket sits on top of that and as snow accumulates inside of the bucket The amount of weight on the mass balance goes up and we can directly determine how much liquid water is actually falling in the bucket Seems are relatively straightforward These gauges have been around for a little while now. They're very precise. They're very sensitive These particular gauges can actually measure down to four one-thousandth of an inch So very tiny very small measurements that we're talking about So That's good. We've got these precipitation gauges. We can stick them out there We can try to measure snow But one of the problems is wind as I had just talked about Wind of course is going to come along with the horizontal component to it and as soon as it hits that gauge We're going to get a little bit of an updraft that goes over that gauge So if it's snowing and we have a snowflake that comes down that snowflake is Going to get caught in our updraft and it's not going to fall in our precipitation gauge Which creates a problem So we have to come up with some unique ways in which we can actually improve snowfall measurements and get the snow to Fall in the gauge like it's supposed to There's all different methods that have been developed for shielding different types of precipitation gauges The fence that you see down here is one of these methods Also point out that the pictures and stuff that you're seeing in this presentation almost all of them are mine I've got credits to the other people on here if I've borrowed things from other people And this is actually from one of our Antarctic sites. This is one of the snow gauge shielding things that we set up The idea behind putting shields and stuff around these gauges is we want to slow the wind down enough So that the vertical component of the snowflake can take over at that point and the snowflake will actually fall inside of the gauge Now there's all different types of techniques and all different measurement methods for doing this For example, the altar shield is one of the most common types of shields used around precipitation gauges in the US Canada uses them a lot too. You'll see them in various other countries It's a circular shield. It measures about four feet in diameter And as the wind speed increases the fins on the shield blow in more and more Which helps slow the wind down and deflect the snowfall particles so that they will actually fall inside of the gauge This shield has been around for about 80 years now. It was developed by a guy named altar back in the 30s We at NCAR actually kind of built on this design over the years And we came up with the initial double altar design where we had the single altar gauge I'm sorry the single altar shield that went around the precipitation gauge And we took a second one measuring about eight feet in diameter and put it around the outside of that a Company called Belfort instrument came along after us. They did some computational fluid dynamic modeling Which is a fancy way of saying they built some computer models to test air flow as it went around the various different shields And they actually came up with a modified design from the one that we had Which we refer to as the Belfort double altar shield And this is the one that we actually ended up deploying in Antarctica For most of our sites and I'm going to get a little bit more into that why we chose this particular type of shielding to put around the precipitation gauges The last one that I want to talk about is what we call the DFIR shield or the double-fenced inner comparison reference This was actually a Russian design I'm not sure when the Russians came up with this But this is actually considered the standard for snowfall measurement If we want to go out and do snowfall measurement We can do comparisons of gauges in different shields to a gauge inside a DFIR and we can come up with Comparisons to see how well they're doing this particular shield Was based off of another shield called the bush shield, which was literally just circular bushes That were put around precipitation gauges and they found that this shield actually worked fairly well in comparison to the bush shield But this shield unlike the other ones is actually 40 feet in diameter So you can start to tell that depending on where you are depending on where you're putting precipitation gauges and Unsightly 40-foot gauge may not necessarily be the type of thing that you want to put in your backyard if you're trying to do accurate snowfall measurements So now we've come up with these different types of shields and stuff that we've put around the gauges So now when we get wind that comes along it's going to hit the shields The wind is actually going to act to slow the shields and now when it starts snowing Where our snowflake is actually going to fall inside of the gauge like it's supposed to Mostly So different shields different applications like I said the DFI our shield is huge. It's 40 feet in diameter It's not something that you're necessarily going to put in every location we put one in Antarctica of the four sites that we set up and Just putting that shield up by itself took us nearly two days Which was not an option for visiting all of the sites So a lot of the questions I get then is okay, so you've got this precipitation gauge You've developed all these different types of shields and stuff that go around these gauges What happens in an actual precipitation event? What does it look like? What do you get? What data do you get from these gauges? So Let me show you some plots Here's an example precipitation event So a lot of the research that we've done for snowfall measurements That we've built on for Antarctica has been done at a test site just south of Boulder here at a site called Marshall It is kind of behind where the Costco sits off of us 36 for those of you that are familiar with the area And we've been doing snowfall measurement now for about 20 25 years Trying to address the question of what is the best way for doing accurate snowfall measurement? so a lot of What we've done has been built on the DFIR we have eight DFIR shields at this site We probably have another Four or five single altar shields and another four or five double altar shields Along with some other types of designs and stuff that have been tested over the years that aren't quite as good and not quite as popular So this is from a precipitation event back in 2014 that we had here in Boulder So the the lighter gray color is the wind speed Which is depicted over on the right-hand side and on the left-hand side is the precipitation accumulation So the dark black line is the accumulation amount that the gauge and the DFIR shield showed for this particular event Which was somewhere on the order of 16 to 17 millimeters. I'm sorry 16. Yeah 16 17 millimeters If you put a precipitation gauge out and you don't put any type of shielding around it That's what that particular Gauge showed so instead of getting 16 to 17 millimeters. We were actually getting on the order of 11 millimeters Roughly a third less of what actually fell If you put an altar shield around your precipitation gauge It's better than not shielding it but still not quite as good as if you had a DFIR shield The Belfort double altar shield that we settled on for use in Antarctica During that time was very close It almost came in at matching the DFIR It was maybe a millimeter or two lower than that so going from a 40-foot diameter shield down to an 8-foot diameter Shield meant that we lost only one or two millimeters was a significant improvement Also one of the thing that I want to point out on these plots Obviously with wind speed as things are changing you notice how these lines start to diverge and you get different amounts in the end You'll notice they start diverging right about the point here Everything was matching up early on before that because it was actually rain and at this point here It switched over to snow So using these shield combinations obviously we won't be able to do this in Antarctica since it doesn't rain in Antarctica But a lot of people can use combinations like this kind of as a precipitation type Discriminator and you can get an idea of when it's going from rain over to snow So now that we have the DFIR we've established that as our standard We can come up with a correction for the Belford double altar the WMO spice project that Lorena alluded to earlier Was a project where we really wanted to establish a world standard for snowfall measurement Every country up to this point has kind of been doing their own thing for snowfall measurement Some people use the altar shield some people use a DFIR some people use the bush some people use all different types of shields There was really no set standard So that the WMO spice project was really a collaboration between 18 18 to 20 different countries where each country Set up a standard set of instruments and then ran these comparisons at all the different sites and then all the data was combined together And we established what our world standard was going to be and for the most part Everybody agreed that the DFIR was going to be the world standard for snowfall measurement now One of the things that they did not have as they were doing this project Was a site that can get really really cold and really really windy Which is kind of where Antarctica starts to come in So one of the things that we wanted to do was take what we've learned here And actually go down to Antarctica and see if these corrections and stuff that we've established thus far actually hold for really cold really windy conditions So that brings me to the segment where Now we're going to Antarctica. So How do we get there? Well, we had to put in a proposal to the National Science Foundation So myself and Mark Sefelt got together and said alright We think the technology is to the point nowadays where we can actually do snowfall measurement down there at this point in time And this is still kind of true Attempts have been made by people to do snowfall measurement down there But most of them have found that it's too cold. It's too windy Instruments generally don't survive you get some data sometimes, but not all of the time And we came in and said, you know, we've got all of these years of experience We're kind of riding along with the results coming from the WMO. Let's give this a try So we put in a proposal and a staff agreed said, let's do this. Let's see if we can do this So we got a three-year proposal That started last fall. So we actually headed down last fall to Antarctica This picture here was actually my first view of Antarctica So we flew down to New Zealand hopped on a military aircraft to C-17 and then from there actually flew down to McMurdo station One of the other reasons that we wanted to go down there It's more than just testing out to make sure that these correction factors and stuff that we've come up with Are accurately working the way that we think they are and because We think that the instruments are going to work. There are worldwide impacts to some of the research that we're actually doing Because we don't have a good understanding of how much snow is actually falling in Antarctica We're primarily relying on weather model output for that There's really no weather stations down there that do this sort of thing We don't know how much snow is actually being added to Antarctica We have a pretty good idea of how much is actually melting off And we've heard in the news recently about different ice sheets and stuff that are starting to break off and significantly large chunks from Antarctica and float away So we have a good idea of what's being lost But nobody really knows what the other side of that equation is how much snow how much precipitation is actually being added on the other side So this is really one of the questions that we want to answer because if we know how much is actually falling in there We can get better estimates of what we expect sea level rise to be in coming years with climate change So some of the research objectives of our project was primarily to design a system that can distinguish falling snow from blowing snow So as you can imagine down in Antarctica and this is on a good day With the high winds and stuff there's a lot of snow that just blows around down there How do you make the distinction is the snow falling or is the snow blowing? So we've come up with a suite of different sensors that we have deployed as Part of our instrument package. So we've got our snow weight precipitation gauge We've also got a snow height gauge and this will give us the snow depth Or the amount of snow that actually accumulates on the ground next to our precipitation gauges. It's kind of a neat sensor It's a sonic base sensor So it sounds sends out a sonic pulse down to the ground And it simply measures the amount of time for the pulse to leave the sensor hit the ground and come back up And as you take those observations frequently, you can see as the snow starts piling up that the signal returns to the sensor much more quickly We've got a snowflake size sensor which I also have one here in front of the podium just to give you an idea of the size of those That's a laser-based sensor. So it emits a laser and As snow is falling down different precipitation particles, they'll fall through the laser beam and this sensor is actually able to see How big those particles are and it'll record record those particle sizes So one of our ideas is we hope to see that for blowing snow versus falling snow when those conditions are happening concurrently that we'll see a distinct size distribution of the blowing snow particles versus the size distribution of the falling particles and From that we'll know how much of the falling particles are contributing to the overall total accumulation that we're seeing in our instruments We have a snowflake counter the one down on the lower left-hand side That actually uses LED lights So it's just looking to see particles that are falling through it and it just counts them for a given amount of time The primary reason that we integrated this sensor in is because we wanted to use this as a way to turn the other sensors on And I'm going to get into the reasons for doing that here in just a minute We also have a wind speed sensor our three-cup anemometer Which obviously goes without saying if we want to know if it's blowing we need to know if the wind is blowing and we have a webcam Which works in both the visible and the infrared so this time of year the Sun is getting lower and lower down at our sites Next month we're going to lose sunlight completely And at that point the sites are going to be on their own to run through the winter on the battery power that we have them on Which brings me to the second research objective is that we had to design a system that operates on just three watts of power Year-round so to give you an idea of how much three watts of power is Three watts of power is enough to power this light bulb for an entire year So all of the sensors and stuff that you see up here in this picture have to be powered on this much power your round This was something that we struggled with a little bit with the instrument manufacturers When we were trying to spec these out Particularly with the precip gauges because all of the instrument manufacturers wanted to sell us precipitation gauges with heaters on them now We cannot have heaters the original snow height sensor that we had was actually a laser-based sensor and We got it. We were getting ready to install it and I kept having conversations with the manufacturer saying There's no heaters on this, right? We can't run heaters on this and I finally got to one of their engineers who said well You can't run the sensor without heaters or the laser won't turn on So then we had to send all the sensors back and we had to switch over to the sonic base type of sensor So it was tricky But I think we ended up coming up with a design where we have these instruments and like I said earlier the snowflake counter instrument that we have That sensor along with wind speed and the precipitation gauge are actually on all of the time We have the snowflake counter set up so that when it detects roughly 30 Particles going through a minute it will actually turn on the rest of the sensors and we can actually start recording measurements from those And that way the other sensors aren't running during during not in precipitation events collecting data That's not really important to us and chewing up the batteries so Let's talk a little bit more about Antarctica Again a lot of people are excited about Antarctica. They hear about it They know it's at the bottom of the world But not a lot of people have an appreciation for how big Antarctica actually is Antarctica itself is about one and a half times the size of the lower 48 And this is to scale so if you took the u.s. And overlaid it on top of Antarctica. This is how big it is Antarctica has 90 percent of the world's ice and 70% of the world's fresh water tied up in that ice There was a recent study. It used to be estimated that Antarctica was covered by ice or approximately 98% of Antarctica was covered by ice the British Antarctic Survey actually came out with some literature recently that said it's actually 99.82% of Antarctica that is covered by ice a slight difference minor difference So to give you some perspective on where you're looking on this over on the left hand side You can kind of see it right on the limb up there is South America And over on the I'm sorry. That's on the left hand side over on the right hand side would be New Zealand up near the top A down a little bit from the top is where this the actual true South Pole is The highest point in Antarctica is Vincent Massif which is Somewhere over in this region over here and then McMurdo station where we were based out of is actually right off the map over on this side over here Antarctica is actually kind of crowded which is another thing that's surprising to some people These are all of the countries that actually have Stations down in Antarctica All of the ones that are labeled in red are stations that are manned year-round That have people there all of the time the blue ones are the seasonal stations They're typically only open in the summer orange ones are stations that used to be there that are closed and yellow ones are proposed Stations that may or may not end up Happening The US has three stations that we maintain year-round So you can see McMurdo down there on the bottom, which is the station that we were primarily based out of Amundsen Scott is the South Pole station So that is right at the South Pole and then Palmer station is a small station out on the Antarctic Peninsula The National Science Foundation is the organization that is responsible for running those stations They manage what's called the US Antarctic program They roughly fund 100 or more research projects a year and this isn't just atmospheric projects This ranges from everything from astronomy to biology to meteorology to basically any type of research stuff that you can think of There's 3,000 people roughly that travel between the US and Antarctica throughout the given Antarctic season Like I said, they have three stations. They have two dedicated ships That will go down there one will go to Palmer station One typically goes to McMurdo station and they have lots and lots of different field camps depending on the different Projects and stuff that are going on This year, they had the Shackleton field camp And they had all sorts of different research and stuff that was going on there One of the more fascinating things that they were doing was actually digging dinosaur bones out of Antarctica And they were getting ready to bring back some of the bones right before I left So I wasn't able to see that But lots of really neat cool science goes on down at Antarctica So another question I commonly get when I say I've been to Antarctica is Did you see the polar bears? So I wanted to put this slide in here to make some distinction about the Arctic versus the Antarctic So the Arctic is at the North Pole. There's no land minus Greenland The ice is roughly 12 to 14 feet thick. There are no penguins, but the polar bears live there Antarctica on the other hand has land The ice is roughly 9,000 feet thick There are no polar bears, but that is where the penguins live Just so that we're all clear. I did not get eaten by a polar bear. We didn't have to take guns. There was no worrying about that So, how did we get there? well The actual route that we took was to fly from Denver to LA LA to Auckland, New Zealand, Auckland, New Zealand to Christ Church and then Christ Church to McMurdo So the US actually does all of its Antarctic research flights out of Christ Church unless you're going to Palmer Station and then you actually fly down to Chile in South America and you take a boat a three-day boat ride across the straight there down to Palmer Station And those are the people that pray really hard that the oceans are going to be calm for that journey because it can be quite miserable Especially if you get seasick very easily To put this in a little bit better perspective Just to see exactly how far we had to go You can see Denver up there at the very top right at the edge The Christ Church station is the one down here And then from Christ Church you actually take the flight down to the very bottom So it's actually a very large portion of the planet that you have to fly across to actually get down to Antarctica But you can't just hop on the flight and go to Antarctica. There's lots of preparation that happens ahead of time Over on the right hand side you can see the clothing distribution center So one of the first things you have to do when you show up there is actually go get outfitted for everything The National Science Foundation provides all of your clothes except for your base layers And they always warn you no cotton cotton is bad because it holds moisture against your skin type of thing But everything from there on out the overalls the coats you'll see my coat laying down there on the bottom Some of these things actually have names associated with them the coats everybody referred to as big red Because it is a giant big red parka And you could always tell Who the people were from the US because the US always had the red parkas the New Zealand people have their base at Scott base Which is right next to McMurdo. They were always in the orange coats. So it was easy to determine who was where boots Undercoats hats gloves all of that stuff was provided by NSF So you go you spend roughly two hours Checking all of your gear out trying everything on to make sure it fits if it doesn't fit You can see the line of people so they're standing at the back. They were all in line to go switch things out Because things weren't fitting quite right once you do that you pack everything up and you get ready to go One interesting thing was that everybody on their coat had their name Right above the pocket. So as you're walking around you can easily identify who the different people are The picture on the upper left is where all of the aircraft are based in Christ Church That fly down to McMurdo. So you actually start right behind where I was taking the picture is where the clothing distribution center was And that is where the United States Antarctic passenger terminal is So the day of your departure You show up to the passenger terminal you go through you get all of your clothes And you can see I had a ton of stuff You actually have to get dressed in your clothes there in Christ Church now. Keep in mind Christ Church on this day was actually 70 degrees So you go in the building you put on all of your base layers, and then you've got big red You've got your big boots Do you walk outside? You're kind of miserable, but you're kind of excited because you're going to Antarctica So everybody lines up in line here the sign that you can kind of see there just to the right of me Says ensure your ECW gear is not in your checked bags So similar to other aircraft plane flights and stuff that you would take you actually have to go through security You have to check in for your flight. You have checked bags, and you have carry-on bags So your ECW gear or your extreme cold weather gear is all of the gear that you have to be dressed in And they don't want you to put it in your checked bags because as soon as you get off of the plane It's not 70 degrees anymore The upper right you can see one of the aircraft that we took that was the C-130 aircraft and To give you an idea of how fun or maybe not how fun it is to actually get to and from there The picture on the bottom shows everybody packed in on the C-130 So there were roughly 40 some people that were on that flight It was literally sitting like this Unfortunately, the C-130s don't fly as fast as the C-17s that they fly down there because the C-17s are jet The C-130s are actually turboprop airplanes And so that particular flight was an eight-hour flight of playing sardine but it's all worth it because You get down to the ice and this is some video of my first steps out onto the ice So we flew down on the C-17 we walked off and the first thing you see is the trans Antarctic Mountains You can see Mount Discovery and then as I pan around here some rich person with their private jet was there And then we have over here on the left Mount Erebus You can see the vehicle there kind of off to the right was actually the vehicle that everybody loaded up into for the ride Over to McMurdo station From the airfield here it takes roughly about 45 minutes to get to McMurdo station Because you can only do about 25 miles an hour down the snow roads there. We did land on the ice shelf We did not land on land because all the land down there is actually hilly. It's volcanic So they just groomed the ice shelf for these aircraft to land on Mount Erebus on the right A lot of people don't know is Earth's southernmost active volcano and Mount Erebus actually put on a show for us several times While we were down there deploying some of our instruments There are projects and stuff that they have going on up on Mount Erebus Where they'll fly helicopters up there and stuff, but instruments and stuff tend not to survive very long because Mount Erebus likes to throw lava bombs Lava bombs the size of Volkswagen bugs So you can put stuff up there, but chances are it's not going to stay there for very long After we get in the vehicle we ride over to McMurdo station The chalet that you see on the right is the first location that we go and that is where we get all of our information our welcome stuff They give us our dorm rooms because all of the housing down there is dorm rooms. Everybody has a roommate It McMurdo itself is the largest Antarctic station Before I left there was upwards of roughly a thousand people on station So you can imagine in the amount of resource and stuff they have to Expend to support all of those people at this site McMurdo is powered by diesel and wind generators It has one coffee shop It has three bars. It has a hospital. It has a firehouse and various other types of things It's got its own water treatment plant. It's got its own sewage treatment plant So it's like a self-sustaining city that is fully supported by the National Science Foundation and the military Once you get there Training training training lots and lots of training The reason that people tend to be there for a while is because almost your entire first week is spent doing training To give you an idea of the training and stuff that we had to go through Each one of these was anywhere from 30 minutes to four hours long The ones that I want to briefly touch on the light vehicle training Which just told you how to get around what to do with the trucks How to make sure that you kept them plugged in so that the fuel wouldn't freeze The Antarctic Field Safety was one of the more important ones That was where they taught us if you're caught out in the field for some reason while you're out deploying instruments The aircraft can't come pick you up. You need to know how to deploy your tent and you need to know how to light the stove Since it was my first time down there. They had split us off into groups I was the lucky one in my group that I was a first-timer. I'd never done this before So I was the one that got to start the stove. They kind of regretted that after they had me start the stove But that is a reason that they have metal tables where we do this stuff on After we finally got through all the training it it came time to get ready to go out and do the actual installation The picture on the left is our lab. You can see the precipitation gauges. We're getting everything hooked up We're getting everything tested out the picture over on the right is a lot of the equipment as we were unpacking it and getting things ready So I mentioned earlier we have several sites that we set up We actually installed four different precipitation monitoring stations near the McMurdo station So you can see Ross Island and McMurdo is actually on Ross Island. It's not technically on the continental Antarctic area Right next to McMurdo station is Williams field and below that is Phoenix Phoenix is actually where most of the intercontinental aircraft land So that's where we first stepped off the aircraft and then we have the Lorne and the Alexander tall tower sites They give you an idea of distances Alexander tall tower is roughly a hundred miles from McMurdo Lorne is roughly 50 miles So we wanted to look at the distribution of snowfall across time as well as across space when we set these different sites up How do we get the stuff out there? Well, you had to transport the equipment by a different several different ways Willie and Phoenix we could transport via truck You just check the trucks out when they're available put the equipment and drive out there Lorne we had to fly out via helicopter And you can imagine the heart attack as I was having as this helicopter is flying away with $20,000 worth of instruments hanging literally by a thread from the bottom of the helicopter The site on the over on the right was actually a helicopter coming into land to pick us up once we were done deploying the site Lorne was one of the last sites we set up. We set up Phoenix and Willie first so we could make sure that we knew What we were doing and those took us a little longer the entire Lorne site We were able to get everything installed in a day It took five helicopter flights to actually get everything out and back when we were doing that But everything went flawlessly for that site. So how do we actually do these installations? Well, first off we need power So over on the left you can see all of the batteries and stuff that were associated with each site Three of the sites had 16 batteries. One of the sites had 22 batteries. These are car batteries Essentially that we were installing. They're not light I can personally attest to that because I lifted every single one of those into those bins So you dig down you put the things in put the batteries in get those all hooked up And then over on the right hand side was one of the towers that we had to set up for the instruments And again, we had to dig down into the snow to set the tower in it It became kind of an ongoing joke amongst our group that we actually weren't scientists We were professional diggers So people would ask us what we did we'd say oh, we're professional diggers and they would say what does that mean? And we'd say we go out and dig holes and fill them back in again The idea was go out dig the hole put the tower in fill it back in with snow to give it some stability But just filling it in with snow was not enough to hold the tower. We also had to guy these towers down Guying the towers down in the snow was also somewhat tricky So we had to come up with these giant wooden planks at the end of the guy wires So you dig down into the snow set these in so that they were kind of at an angle to the tower So that if the tower started to move you've got a lot of surface area from these boards to keep it from moving But again that meant for every site we had to dig two holes for the two towers and three holes for each guy wire for each tower Then Came installing the instruments and stuff on the towers So here's a site of some of the people Getting the stuff ready. You can see some of the sensors up. We're starting to wire things into our electronics box And then we've got the shielding that we had to put up Now keep in mind these instruments are on 10 foot towers So getting the shields from this level up another 10 feet was a little bit tricky It took us a couple of tries at the willy site until we got it down But toward the end we were actually able to get one of the shields assembled roughly in about an hour and a half So it worked out fairly well and then toward the end of the installation One of the big things was making sure that the shields themselves were also guy wired down So an additional set of four guy wires for each of those shields In the end we got all four sites installed The willy field site was our premier site. So like I mentioned earlier We want to check and see if that snowfall correction that was developed by WMO Spice actually holds in the Antarctic environment So at the willy field we installed the DFIR and we installed two pliwio gauges in two different Belfort double altars And the reason we did the two is you can see the one on the right is actually sitting lower It's at the same height as the DFIR and then the one over on the left is actually at our standard height The reason that we put the ones on the 10 foot tower was primarily to address the blowing snow situation The higher up you get it the less like you are that blowing snow along the ground is actually going to go into your gauge So we wanted to go high but not too high Tall tower was another site that we set up. This was the furthest one away It's so-called tall tower because there's actually a hundred foot tower installed at this site With instruments at various different levels. We piggybacked at this site because they already had a bunch of other instruments there And we just kind of ran our stuff in a line Lauren and Phoenix were the other two sites that set up I put one picture in here because they primarily look roughly the same So we got everything set up, but then it became a matter of waiting for the data You have to sit around wait make sure everything is working correctly So while you're waiting it became time to explore McMurdo see what sorts of things were actually around there One of the things that we got to experience Actually, I didn't get to experience this but in the background you see what's called Castle Rock You can actually hike out to Castle Rock from McMurdo It's about a two and a half hour hike to get out there and you can actually go up to the top of it in order to get there though You have to walk across the glacier So they actually have mountaineers that go out every spring that stake out a safe path For people to hike along so that you don't inadvertently fall in a crevasse The things that the features and stuff that you see in front of there are pressure ridges These are features that form in the ice shelf So the ice shelf along McMurdo where we installed our instruments is actually moving all of the time and as it starts to brush up against land It starts to get these waves in it because the ice shelf is trying to move the land is not and eventually Those ridges start to buckle and you get what's called pressure ridges where the ice actually is forced upward and you get all These different types of ice formations The New Zealanders are the crazy ones who actually send mountaineers out along these repertor zones And they also stake out paths that you can then go along and walk and take pictures of the pressure ridges themselves Another thing we got to do was climb under the ice So a lot of people get to see pictures and stuff of what Antarctica looks like from above There were projects that were funded down there where people were actually diving below the ice Which sounds kind of scary sounds kind of a little sketchy But actually the divers that I talked to said this was the easiest dive of their life The water is so cold. It's so stable. There's not a lot of currents and stuff So they kind of go diving and do essentially whatever they needed to do also the water if you think about it It's water. It's liquid. Its temperature is not going to be nearly as cold as the air temperature was around there So your water temperature is a little below freezing and stuff as long as they were in dry suits They could actually go diving for roughly 40 minutes Somebody came up with the idea of developing what's called the ob tube Or a tube that they could go out and drill a hole in the ice and sink the thing down in so that people can actually go underneath The ice and see what it looked like. It's a 15-foot tube and you can get an idea of how small the tube actually is by The picture of me over there on the left Not for claustrophobic people the fire department actually has to do training exercises before they allow anyone to go in in case Somebody gets stuck so they know how to get them back out You're not allowed to wear big red down in the observation tube because usually with big red It's too big for you to actually fit in the tube So that gives you an idea of the small confined space that you're actually doing dealing with But once you go under the ice This is what you see beautiful blue ocean If you're lucky, you can sometimes see penguins or seals coming by You can see jellyfish. You can see fish. You'll see algae and plankton and stuff up on the bottom of the ice I Borrowed a couple of pictures from my roommate at the time Greg neary Greg was actually down there not as a scientist, but as a writer So NSF while it supports the scientists It also has a program for artists and writers that people can apply to And you can go down and experience Antarctica and actually do a story on it Some of the writer or some of the divers that were down there were actually diving down and drawing sketches of the Underwater sea life that they were seeing on the seafloor So that's a picture of Greg from one of the divers inside the observation port And then he had another diver take a picture as they were a little ways away So you can see the observation port hanging down below the sea ice Probably one of the most unique things that I did down in McMurdo by far This is one of the neatest things down there and because sound travels so well in the water You can hear the seals actually talking back and conversing with each other underneath the water Some of the other sites around McMurdo At first this doesn't look terribly exciting, but if you look a little bit closer You can see this mountain range here is actually mirrored and you see the same thing over here and over here again There are actually a lot of mirages that happened down in that area So the air near the surface would get so cold It could actually bend light and you'd get these really cool reflections of things at the surface right above the surface Other sites of the pressure ridges like I said you can go out and actually take tours and stuff of the pressure ridges And see all the different types of ice formations And there's also the huts This is discovery hut, which is right there next to McMurdo You can walk out to it. You can see McMurdo over there on the right This hut was built in 1902 By Scott when he landed in that area. It's the original hut. There are two others like it in the area The New Zealand People have actually done a fantastic job of preserving these Everything inside is essentially as it was back in the early 1900s when they left them there So you go inside there is food. There's the cots the stove This particular one I think had a dead dead penguin that they were dissecting before they left laid out in there But all of the original stuff from the early 1900s is in these sites And it's pretty fascinating to go in and look and see some of the different instruments And stuff that they had in these areas There was also the wildlife So the primary wildlife that you see in these areas are seals Which we more famously called the sea slugs because that's basically what they did was just lay there on the ice And of course the penguins I was not fortunate enough to see the penguins We had one good snow storm that came through while I was there That actually cleaned up the sea ice and prevented it from melting off because normally as the sea ice starts melting off As it gets closer to McMurdo the penguins actually start coming into McMurdo My roommates Greg on the other hand because he was a writer got to go out and visit some of the penguin colonies So he snapped that picture But we did have one Aaron penguin one day that came into McMurdo Greg actually took this video. I borrowed it from him So I'm gonna play some audio here. You can hear Greg talking to him He was up on the helicopter pad and got freaked out when the helicopter spun up So he stopped here until he saw the helicopter get ready to take off and you'll hear the helicopter start to take off And you'll see him look up at it. I'm not sure where he was going But we nicknamed him turbo other things to do around McMurdo There's also lots of opportunity for socializing like I said McMurdo had three bars the coffee shop itself actually Doubled as a coffee shop slash wine bar So in the morning you had the coffee shop or what we called the Starbucks the McMurdo Starbucks And then in the evening it converted over to a wine bar Around Thanksgiving time people like to have a little bit of fun down there. They have their own turkey trot But it's not your standard turkey trot. It's like a mix of the turkey trot meets Halloween Because everybody dressed up you can see a seal over on the right-hand side You can see a clown you can see some of the people from the hospital And I think this is actually a 5k race that they run I'm down in the lower right is actually a view from the galley So you have to feed the people while they're down there The galley staffed is an excellent job of making sure that everybody stays well fed So you have meals three times a day breakfast lunch and dinner that they serve But there's also food available 24-7 so for example if you get the munchies at 11 o'clock at night You can call over to the galley and say I'd love to have a pizza And they will make you a pizza and you can walk over to the pizza and pick it up and take it back to your dorm room They have Recreation rooms and all of the dorms and stuff some of the dorms have saunas so we get really cold you can go in warm up But lots of opportunity for people to interact down there Oftentimes the bars will host open mic nights They invite people to come in and jam as part of bands and stuff And it's really amazing some of the instruments and stuff that people manage to get in their luggage down to Antarctica One of the other cool things about Antarctica was every project had its own sticker And this was actually a good way of getting people excited and knowledgeable about what you did And it wasn't just the scientific projects that had stickers the IT people had stickers The one over there on the left is actually the scientific cargo group They're the ones that handle all of the cargo coming to and from McMurdo The one in the center is actually our sticker and As an appreciation I actually have stickers for anybody who is interested that I printed out that are exactly the stickers that we hand it out To all of the people that we interacted with down in McMurdo So anybody who's interested we have these for you after the talk So all of these cool things go out talk to the different groups. This is kind of my collection of stickers I had a few others in there. I'm hoping to pick up more when I go back this fall But then it came time to actually go back and say, okay We've been having some fun aside. We got to look at data. We got to see how our sites and stuff are doing Here's an example of some of the initial data that we're that we're getting from one of the sites This is from the willy-field site. This is from the beginning of this month. So this is brand new data I haven't even really had a chance to sit down and dig through it too much But you can see this is accumulation. I put this one in inches for you guys instead of millimeters like the last one And again, we're this is the liquid water Measurement this isn't snow depth. So for this particular event, we ended up with almost point two inches of liquid water McBurdo's actually been having an unusually snowy summer season It's not common that you see events like this But the unique thing that we're getting out of this data and I had kind of anticipated it But not to the degree that we're actually seeing in the data You notice that we get the accumulation of vent and then the line starts to fall off after that That's actually precipitation sublimating out so sublimation is the process where water goes from an ice directly to a vapor It bypasses the melting phase So now we're actually getting an idea of not only how much snow is falling down there But how much is actually disappearing into the air itself? And this is one cool thing about the project. We did not put into the proposal We did not say we were actually setting out to measure But it is one thing that we probably will will end up reporting on in the end because again There have been estimates of how much snow is sublimating off down there, but nobody has actually really measured this before So for this given event it took almost two weeks for that point two inches of snow to disappear off of that area a Little bit of discussion on some future work. It's a three-year project like I said So we're going down two more times. We've got one more trip plan for this fall Which will be kind of a maintenance type of trip And make sure everything's working fix any problems if things blow away in the wind this upcoming winter We'll have to be prepared to fix that put things back and then tentatively the plan is to remove all of the sites in 2019 for the end of the project We are hoping that if we get some good data from this we can write a follow-on proposal to NSF to keep this Work going and put more precipitation gauges out across more of the continent and really start getting a good idea of how much Precipitation is actually falling in Antarctica Of course analyze the data and that's going to be one of our primary things I've been excited looking at some of the data we're getting in from some of these sites We can definitely see when we're getting precipitation events We haven't had any really good windy events yet So I know at this point what we're getting actually is accumulation and the plan This upcoming summer is to bring a student in to help me out and do comparisons of what the weather models are showing For that for those given events to what we were actually measuring and see how well are the weather models doing down there and come up Can we come up with some preliminary corrections to them a couple of things that I put on there? I do maintain a blog while I am down in Antarctica So if anybody is interested in following along on my adventures when I go back down this fall Please feel free to subscribe to that You can go back and read through everything that we did this past fall I've got a lot more pictures and stuff in there as well a lot more discussion and details and some of the things that we did and I also put a link up here to USAP if anybody is interested themselves in going down to Antarctica either as a Artist or writer or if you want to go down as some of the help to keep things running at some of the different sites either seasonally Or as a year-round type of thing if you go to this site you'll see a jobs and opportunities section and you can read what the requirements and stuff are for all of the different positions and With that I've got a few more pictures that I will let run here for you guys to enjoy That's pretty much the end of my talk. So if you have any questions, I'm happy to take them and we do have