Utqiagvik, where there’s still snow in June

 A group of University of Alaska Fairbanks faculty, students and staff has been in Utqiagvik since mid-May to measure snow melt, but the melt only started this week.

This is an exceptionally late melt year.

The SALVO Team has been working hard through the midnight sun, which never sets in Utqiagvik.

The team includes Jennifer Delamere, Matthew Sturm, Melinda Webster, Anika Pinzner, Phillip Wilson, Ema Mayo, Serina Wesen, Hannah Chapman-Dutton and Owen Larson, all from UAF. The team also includes David Clemens-Seawall from Dartmouth and David Shean with the University of Washington. 

We did not think we would be riding snowmachines in mid-June and still wearing snow pants in summer.

Currently, melt ponds are starting to form, and we are still able — carefully — to go out to one of our study sites on the Chukchi Sea ice. Some of our regular measurements include snow pits, snow grain sizes, bottom temperature snow measurements, finding snow water equivalent, measuring albedo and incoming radiation, using magnaprobes to calculate snow depth, taking snow samples to find snow impurities and making terrestrial lidar scans.

"The goal of the project is to understand the mechanisms that control the speed in which the landscape clears of snow and therefore absorbs solar radiation,” said Sturm, group leader for the Snow, Ice and Permafrost Group at the UAF Geophysical Institute.