It’s been a busy few months in the COOL Lab! PI Sarah Cooley was on maternity leave in Fall 2025 but fortunately lab activities continued in her absence.
The first COOL Lab PhD defense!
First, a huge congratulations to Dr. Eric Levenson for defending his PhD in Geography from the University of Oregon on March 6, 2026! Eric’s dissertation was titled ‘Mapping Arctic Surface Water Dynamics from Space’. Eric has now started a postdoc position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We’ll miss him in our lab meetings but glad that he’ll still be working on SWOT and collaborating with group members in the future.
Publications
Former MS student Addison Pletcher’s paper on observing fine-scale lake ice breakup dynamics in southwest Alaska was published in Hydrological Processes. Addy’s paper analyzed ice breakup timing in nearly 150,000 lakes as small as 0.001 square kilometers in the Lower Kuskokwim River Basin using Sentinel-2 imagery. Her work found that small lakes on average lose ice cover one week earlier than large lakes and respond faster to spring warming.
Postdoc Elizabeth Webb led a paper on disentangling trends in Arctic lake area which was published in Scientific Reports. This research found that differences in the magnitude and direction of regional lake area trends derived from Sentinel-2 and Landsat are caused by systematic differences in surface water detection in dry vs. wet years.
Grants
Sarah was awarded a new NASA grant investigating linkages between river, ice and coastal ocean processes in Northern Alaska as part of NASA’s new FORTE campaign which is a large collaborative effort seeking to better understanding the changing Alaskan coastal environment. This four-year grant is a collaboration with Dr. Tamlin Pavelsky at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and will start in April 2026.
Presentations and Conferences
In October 2025, PhD students Eric and Camryn presented at the SWOT Science Team Meeting held in Archachon, France. In December 2025, PhD students Camryn, Ana, and Noah and postdoc Elizabeth all attended and presented at the AGU Fall Meeting in New Orleans. Finally, in February 2026, PI Sarah co-organized a Multi-Disciplinary Sea Ice Workshop held at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, which brought together ~20 sea ice scientists from a very wide range of disciplinary backgrounds.
Fieldwork
PhD student Ana spent two weeks in Utqiagvik, Alaska in January conducting interviews with local land users about trail access and climate change. We are now in the midst of planning for multiple field campaigns in Alaska this summer, including both a return trip to Utqiagvik as well as lake surveys throughout the state.
New Lab Members
Duke undergraduate student Lauren Coleman joined the lab as a research assistant in January 2026, along with returning undergrad Annie Cushman. This summer we are excited to welcome both Lauren, Annie, and new undergrad Tsvetelina Milkova as full-time research assistants in the COOL Lab!
