A quarterly research and development magazine.
Using a closely integrated team of national laboratory partners, the ACRF provides the complex physical infrastructure and data systems needed for national and international research efforts related to global climate change, says Ivey. The North Slope site for ACRF provides the facilities, support, and atmospheric measurement data for an international group of scientists. “We’ve also been incredibly fortunate in receiving the support of native Inuit — what we call Eskimo — communities in the vicinity of the site,” says Ivey.
“Essentially, our work at these facilities enables us to contribute to improvements in climate models that simulate global climate change,” Zak says. Such global climate models are tools for calculating atmospheric, land, and oceanic conditions all over the earth. By providing cloud and radiative transfer information to climate modelers, says Zak, the site’s data will help to improve the performance of generalcirculation and related models of the atmosphere as tools for predicting future global and regional climate changes.
A strong indicator of the value of the site’s work is the number of researchers who make use of the data obtained there. Academic, foreign, domestic, and other researchers from many different areas of research use the data. Many also come to the site for field campaigns to temporarily add their own unique measurement capabilities to the existing instrumentation suite and study specific phenomena.
“People are still publishing peer-reviewed articles based on the 2004 data,” says Zak. “We found far fewer ice nuclei than had been expected — that is, far fewer aerosol particles capable of nucleating ice crystals. This means that water was staying liquid even at very low temperatures. That has direct implications, not only for climate, but for the Federal Aviation Administration as well, because when this liquid water comes into contact with planes, it instantly converts to ice. These icing conditions can bring down an aircraft.”
“Our work isn’t just limited to climate research,” says Ivey. “The Army has done research on the atmospheric phenomena that cause the twinkling of the night sky, and how distant objects can be seen more easily through the atmosphere at certain times of the day, under certain meteorological conditions. Our location and instruments at the North Slope provide data sets that are useful to a wide range of research interests. That is one of the reasons the locale was chosen.”
This year is also the 50th anniversary of the International Geophysical Year, an international scientific effort that initiated a comprehensive series of global geophysical activities spanning the period July 1957-December 1958. The seeds of the present concern about global climate change were planted during the International Geophysical Year. Prior to the 1957- 58 effort, it was not known that the burning of fossil fuels was progressively changing the composition of the global atmosphere.
Technical contact: Mark Ivey, (505) 284-9092, mdivey@sandia.gov
Media contact: Darrick Hurst, (505) 844-8009, drhurst@sandia.gov
©1997-2011 Sandia Corporation | Questions and Comments | Privacy and Security | 
News release RSS feed