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Aurora Pond

The observatory at Aurora Pond will be run by a group of home-school families coordinated by Deb Bennett. Deb’s children are Kate and Jack, and they will be working with Bonnie and her mother Janlee Irving, and Will and his mother Mary Calmes.

Their involvement in ALISON can be traced back to a somewhat chilly (-28.8°C ) Sunday, 2 December 2001, when Martin demonstrated ice and snow measurements at Aurora Pond to a group of eighteen Alaska GLOBE Program teachers and the program coordinators. Two of those teachers were Deb Bennett and Todd Hindmann, also an ALISON participant.

Home-school families getting ready to place hot-wire gauges on Aurora Pond, November 2002.

Deb subsequently contacted Martin Jeffries to ask if he would be able to give an ice and snow observatory demonstration to a group of home-school parents and children. After a demonstration on 20 February 2002 to about twenty people at Aurora Pond, the Bennett, Irving and Calmes families subsequently met Martin and Shannon Graham each Wednesday to make ice and snow measurements. A competition to estimate the maximum ice thickness was won by Jack Bennett, whose estimate of 0.78 m was identical to the actual value on 17 April.

Home-school students measure the temperature at the snow surface on Aurora Pond, March 2002.

The measurements made at Aurora Pond in 2001-02 by the home-school group are an important contribution to our knowledge of lake ice and snow variability in the Fairbanks area. The Irving family also made an important material contribution in the form of the inflatable boat that we needed to continue the study at Poker Flat during the 2002 melt season.

Everyone enjoyed their visits to Aurora Pond so much that they asked if they could make measurements all winter of 2002-03. After waiting patiently for the ice to form during a particularly mild fall, the observatory was set up on Monday 18 November 2002.