Summer Fieldwork
It was a busy summer of fieldwork all over Alaska for the COOL Lab! Camryn and Elizabeth led deployments of pressure transducers in 30+ lakes across Alaska, including in the Fairbanks area, at Toolik Field Station just north of the Brooks Range, and in Utqiagvik at the very northernmost tip of Alaska. The goal of this fieldwork is to both evaluate the accuracy of SWOT surface water variability measurements and also assess the degree to which lake level variability is related to precipitation minus evapotranspiration as measured by nearby flux towers.

Ana and Noah spent two weeks in Utqiagvik working on our trails project (led by the University of Leeds). They conducted interviews with 14 local land users about inland and coastal travel and learned a ton about local resilience to climate conditions. The whole group (minus Camryn) then united in Utqiagvik, where along with finishing up interviews and lake deployments, we got to experience the 4th of July festivities, try maktak (traditional Iñupiat food consisting of whale blubber), and marvel at the presence of sea ice and lake ice in July.

Finally, Camryn spent three weeks as teaching faculty on the Juneau Icefield Research Program in southeast Alaska. During her time there, Camryn taught students about SWOT, glacier hydrology, and GNSS, and got to enjoy learning and teaching in an absolutely stunning environment.

All in all, it was a fantastic field campaign that reminded us all why we love to do this work. We are very grateful to NASA, the European Research Council, the Juneau Icefield Research Program, as well as the US Permafrost Association’s Family Care Program for supporting our fieldwork. See photos below!

Summer Undergraduate Researchers
Along with fieldwork, this summer we were also busy hosting three Duke undergrads for full-time internships with our group. We loved having Lauren, Tsveti, and Annie around all summer! Lauren assisted with our sea ice and Inuit art project, including analyzing transcripts and classifying imagery, Tsveti worked on the Arctic community trails project, including obtaining historical climate data and creating maps and visualizations of trail usage in Utqiagvik, and Annie started a new project involving investigating ice jam floods using Sentinel-2 and SWOT data.

New Lab Members
We are excited to welcome Key Hatch and Julianne Davis to our group! Key is a new PhD student who comes to Duke from Appalachian State University where his undergraduate research involved studying water tracks on the North Slope of Alaska. Julianne is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who is joining our group as a visiting researcher working on our joint Duke-UNC NASA FORTE grant, focusing on interactions between rivers and sea ice on the North Slope of Alaska.

Media
Earlier this summer, some of our group’s research was featured in the Nicholas School’s “Postcards From the Poles” highlighting ongoing polar research at Duke. Thanks to Julie Leibach and the Nicholas School media team for putting together these brief articles about our work on sea ice and art and Arctic community trails!