Adios, San Juan! Today, we said goodbye (or rather adios) to the port of San Juan and hello/hola to the Atlantic Ocean. The past few days have been a whirlwind of unpacking, setting up our gear, securing our gear, mounting sensors, stretching cable from one end of the ship to the other, testing instruments, attending […]
NAAMES-IV Expedition: March 18, 2018
In 30 days I’ll be a salty veteran. I’m going out to sea for 3 1/2 weeks with a group of scientists I’ve never met, a fellow lab mate, and a professor from Rutgers. We’re traveling to the North Atlantic to cleverly observe the largest assemblage of phytoplankton on our planet. I’ve heard these research […]
2018 Winter Olympics End, But ICE-POP Continues
The first part of the ICE-POP campaign ended last Sunday when the 2018 Winter Olympic Games were officially finished. However, we will closely monitor the weather and provide information from Pyeongchang during the Paralympics as well. The strong wind that characterized the Olympics has stopped blowing in the last week. This brought unexpected changes in […]
Forecasting Snow is a Difficult Task in Pyeongchang
Gangneung and Daewallyeong, the cities where the Winter Olympics are taking place, have a unique characteristic for precipitation. The cold and dry front from Siberia converges with the moist air of the Korean East Sea to produce stratiform clouds that occasionally precipitate over the PyeongChang province. This condition where the precipitation comes from the east […]
Keeping an Eye on Weather During the Opening Ceremony
International Collaborative Experiments for Pyeongchang 2018 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (ICE-POP 2018) is a field campaign that is taking place during the 2018 Winter Olympics held at Pyeongchang, South Korea. It brings state of the art weather sensors from all over the world, and the Dual-frequency Dual-polarized Doppler radar (D3R) from NASA is among […]
The Footsteps of Apollo Astronauts
On our team’s last day at Kilbourne Hole, we were joined by retired astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, the lunar module pilot for Apollo 17. He is the only professional geologist to have walked on the Moon and is still an active researcher. Schmitt joined our 2017 excursion for very much the same reason that Butch […]
Staying Afloat in a Sea of Data
One aspect of our work is studying is how different types of information can be combined to help the scientists understand the site from during and after an EVA. We brought an array of instruments and cameras, which I’ll describe below. We also brought a collaborator from Canada, Ben Feist, to explore ways to combine […]
Reporting RIS4E
Traveling with us were four journalism students from the Stony Brook University School of Journalism; their professor, Elizabeth Bass, the founding director of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University; and teaching assistant Kevin Lizarazo. This group joined us in the field to see firsthand how research gets done. They hiked […]
Kilbourne and Aden: Two Flavors of Volcanism
Our first destination in Potrillo was Kilbourne Hole, a maar crater that was formed about 16,000 to 24,000 years ago. It’s an irregular hole measuring about 1-1/2 miles by 2 miles. Kilbourne is thought to be the result of a steam explosion that occurred when hot magma encountered shallow groundwater. The result was excavation of […]