Putting aside the Poker Flat study sites, where we have worked since autumn 1999, we have visited Aurora Pond in Fairbanks more often than any other ALISON study site. This is partly for obvious reasons – we live and work in Fairbanks – and also because it is the longest-running ALISON site visited by an educator and students: Deb Bennett has been coordinating visits to Aurora Pond by home-school parents and children since February 2002. So, Aurora Pond is about to be subject to its fourth full winter of measurements.

Today, Sunday, I met Deb and her son Jack, who made his first visit to Aurora Pond in February 2002, at 1 pm on a bright afternoon with not a cloud in the sky. The air temperature was around -19.5°C, but the wind was calm and you could still feel a little warmth from the sun. By the time we left at 2:45 pm the sun was very low on the horizon and you could feel the temperatures falling fast.

Aurora Pond froze over completely only two weeks ago, and I was very curious to know how thick the ice would be, since we have hade so little snowfall since then. The ice was covered with a curious mix of hoar-frost and light dusting of snow, with an average depth of ~3 cm. Temperatures at the bottom of that thin, uneven blanket of insulation where around -13/-14°C, and the ice thickness was 0.224 m – very safe to walk on. Even so, the ice creaked and groaned mildly as we walked around because it has contracted so much in the cold weather.

Conditions were perfect for putting in an ALISON study site and in no time at all we had installed the equipment (two TWITs and an ice temperature profiler) and the 21 wooden stakes, and taken a full set of measurements and snow samples. It will be interesting to see what the conductive heat flow was once Deb and Jack have entered the data into the computer. My guess is that it was around -10 W m^-2.

By 3 pm I was picking up Kim at the Geophysical Institute, where she had been working on a project for a web site design class, and not long after that we were at home enjoying a glass of wine before I had to take care of more mundane things – ironing pants and shorts to wear this week at the office.

Putting in the Aurora Pond study site concluded a busy and successful week of ALISON activities: North Pole High School site installation on Monday; Delta Junction site installation on Tuesday; ALISON parents night at Tri-Valley School, Healy, on Thursday; and Horseshoe Lake, Denali National Park, site installation on Friday. My next destinations are Huslia and Hughes immediately after Thanksgiving weekend.

Jack and his mother, Deb, help set up the ALISON site at Aurora Pond, Fairbanks on
13 November, 2005.