Spring fieldwork in Barrow

At the end of April, I (Stephen) traveled up to Barrow on the northern Arctic coast of Alaska to finish out a season-long, NSF-funded atmospheric study in collaboration with Penn State and Purdue Universities. For the next month, I would be manning the chemical ionization mass spectrometer, or CIMS, that was measuring the extremely interesting chemical interactions between the boundary level air and snowpack, right during the melt season! Being focused on mid-latitude, urban atmospheric chemistry, this was definitely a change of pace!

At the iconic "Welcome to Barrow" sign on the beach!

Just as the weather was finally starting to warm up in Ann Arbor, naturally it was time to head thousands of miles north, back to the snow and ice. In a snow chemistry lab, it's not a successful summer unless it's snowing out.

At the end of April, the weather was actually quite nice for Barrow standards- temps right around freezing, occasional flurries, low winds, the works. Basically paradise. But also very above average for that time of year. In fact, on May 11th, Barrow broke a high temperature record for the single warmest day ever in the first half of May (41F). More on that later!

When I arrived, there was still a significant snowpack on the tundra that had been quite hardened and wind-blown over the course of the winter, so it was pretty easy to walk on. On this tundra was our shed packed full of instrumentation and supplies, as well as a couple of people to keep track of it all. With the weather getting warm, it actually got quite hot in the shed with everything running, even with all of holes drilled in the walls over the years of past field studies.

The world famous sled shed, 154 Cake Eater Road, where all the magic happens.

The sled shed out in the distance (it was actually quite brighter out than the picture suggests)

Sunglasses were absolutely necessary

So, what are we doing again? I mentioned the snowpack before, and that's an important part to our work in the Arctic. The snow in the area gets "contaminated" by sea spray from the Arctic Ocean nearby, depositing halide salts all over the snowpack. With a little sunlight and the right pH of the snowpack, we can have trace amounts of highly reactive halogen gases emitted, which are then measured by the CIMS. The process of converting the halides (eg Br-) into something more reactive like bromine (Br2) is called halogen activation. These reactive halogen gases can then quickly deplete ozone. What nobody really knows is how much halogens are actually emitted from the snowpack! This is very important for models that want to predict how this chemistry will change as the Arctic warms up. Open ocean is becoming more common, which could potentially bring more sea spray to the snowpack.

Using Angela Raso's specialized twirl-in-place technique to wind up a sampling line for the CIMS! I promise we weren't screwing around on the tundra all day...

Open ocean on the horizon, May 2, 2016.