April 26 update
Well, its been almost a week since our last big update, and lots of things have happened!
Firstly, a new group of people came into camp, the rest of the Marsh team, including Phil (tall version), Gabriel, Anton, and Matt. Gabriel is our meteorological station technician, working hard to make sure our eddy covariance, methane sensor, and other meteorological instruments are working properly before the summer season. During the course of the harsh Arctic winter, many instruments are prone to breaking, as we are pushing the limits of the conditions of which they are designed to work in. The MET stations often die during winter as well, since there is a month of full darkness and the stations are run completely on solar power. This year we are coordinating with NASA's ABoVE campaign, which will compare airborne measurements of eddy covariance and methane with ground based measurements. Aaron's radar measurements have been going smoothly. He has managed to scan multiple pits with full snow, slab snow removed, and all snow removed. This involved a lot of digging, especially on Vicky's part!
In the Marsh team, we have begun to do our historical end of winter snow surveys. These surveys have been completed every year since the mid-nineties, and are crucial to building a long term dataset. This involves taking snow depth measurements using an auto-recording snow depth instrument called a MagnaProbe, and density measurements using a snow tube and weight scale. Magnaprobes measure snowdepth using a free moving disk which sits on the snow surface as you push the rod into the pole. Then with the press of a button, the MagnaProbe measures the snow depth, and records the position using GPS! This is much more efficient than the old way of writing down the depth, and the coordinates, then entering it into the computer. A single person can easily take 1000 snow depth measurements in one day. Matt, Anton, and Phil have been tackling these tasks since they arrived in camp via skidoo on April 22nd.
I (Evan), have also been beginning my snow surveys in the two lake basins which are of major interest to me. From all my work, I should be able to calculate an hourly water budget for the entire summer period. The end of winter snow survey is important to the water budget, as it is the largest input of water for the year. Knowing the total water stored in the snow before it begins to melt, and measuring discharge and water level in the lake, allows you to see how quickly the snow turns into water and enters the lake, and is eventually discharged. As of now, the weirs which I built last fall are fully buried in ice, something which was not expected. As a consequence, we will have to drill a channel into the ice, measure its dimensions and then use that as a makeshift weir. This will be interesting to say the least, but this is the reality of working in such an environment, you must plan to be flexible. I have made a drone flight over the two basins, which are adjacent to one another, in order to measure snow depth using the drone. I had laid out 10 orange X's on the ground, and measured them using our new Leica GNSS system, which is accurate to within 1cm in XYZ, to be used in the post processing of the drone images in order to tie the images in to the geodetic datum properly. These GCP's are important in order to make the drone imagery as accurate as possible at measuring the snow surface. This drone flight will then be subtracted from the bare ground surface model, in order to calculate snow depth.
Branden has also been flying the drone and RTK surveying his ground control points for his study basin Siksik Creek. This is a repeat of the work he did last year (see previous year blog posts for more detail). Although this data will not be used immediately for his grad research project, it is still good practice to continue the data collection for comparison between years. Over the next few weeks Branden will prepare his weir in the channel for the spring freshet, and hopefully this year it doesn’t get washed down the stream. Other than that the next few weeks will see a regular routine of repeated snow surveys, UAV flights, and waiting for the snow to melt.
Today we saw the arrival of our Supervisor and boss, Philip Marsh, who was granted permission to drive the Inuvik-Tuk Highway and visit camp for a few days. We are sitting at 11 total in camp which exceeds our previous record of 6 for this time of the year. This number is also our “comfortable maximum” while still allowing for everyone to have ample elbow room between their neighbour.
Check out our @marsh_lab_TVC twitter for more photos of our progress.
Till next time.
-Evan and Branden