Sometimes in science everything just comes together, but not often. This time it did. What could have gone wrong in the campaign? Lots. The two biggest possibilities were that the weather could have been bad (Fig. 1) during the five-day window when the airplane was with us, grounding the plane and making it impossible to [...]

By Chris Polashenski and Simon Filhol It has been a very busy time for us the last few days. After about 8 days of prep work, our aircraft arrived in beautiful weather. Our pilot, Paul, and Dr. Chris Larsen started flying airborne LiDAR immediately, and as will be seen, collecting enormous amounts of data. Meanwhile [...]

April 14th: It has been a busy few days. Yesterday the remaining part of team arrived from Fairbanks. The seven are from Fairbanks and Colorado, all veterans of Arctic snow research, with the exception of Allison, a graduate student from the University of Colorado. We have been working at three things from the start of [...]

April 9th: Now that we have arrived the work begins. We spent the day checking out the snow, putting our ground-based LiDAR together and testing it, and dealing with some lingering logistical problems (like making sure ten barrels of aviation fuel arrive before the plane does). Checking out the snow is my favorite activity, and [...]

April 8th, 2012: I had somehow missed that we were leaving on Easter Sunday…. but the drive North across Alaska and the Brooks Range on a perfect day, clear blue skies, pristine white snow, and majestic mountains, was ample compensation for leaving town on a holiday, and my four companions (Fig. 1) did not seem [...]