Posts Tagged «Melinda Webster»

Arctic System Science, NSF

Collaborative Research: Spatiotemporal variability of solar radiation partitioning in the sea ice system: improving climate models using observations from the MOSAiC field campaign; Principal Investigator.   

UNSOL_FY2022, NASA

The seasonal cycle of Arctic snow depth from ICESat-2: linkages to summer freeboards and albedo; PI

DE-FOA-0002414: Biological and Environmental Research, DOE

How snow drives the seasonal evolution of land and sea surface albedos in the Alaskan high Arctic; Co-I.

Engineer Research & Development Center: Cold Regions Research & Engineering Laboratory

Observing and Predicting Coastal Sea Ice Stability & Trafficability; Co-Investigator.

NNH19ZDA001N-IDS: Interdisciplinary Research in Earth Science, NASA

Investigating the Fate of Sea Ice & Interactions with the Polar Atmosphere in the “New Arctic”; Co-Investigator.

NNH18ZDA001N-PMMST: Precipitation Measurement Missions (PMM) Science Team, NASA 

Using GPM in an Optimal Estimation Lagrangian Framework (OELaF) to quantify moisture transport in Arctic Cyclones; Co-Investigator.

NNH19ZDA001N-ATDM: Weather & Atmospheric Dynamics, NASA

Improving Understanding of Precipitation Events in the Arctic; Principal Investigator.

NNH17ZDA001N-TASNPP: The Science of TERRA, AQUA, and SUOMI NPP, NASA 

Refinement and Enhancement of the Terra and Aqua MODIS and Suomi NPP VIIRS Cryosphere Algorithms and Data Products; Co-Investigator.

NNH17ZDA001N-NIP: New (Early Career) Investigator Program in Earth Science, NASA 

Assessing & improving the seasonal capability of ICESat-2 data for sea ice research; Principal Investigator.

Arctic sea ice likely reached its 2018 lowest extent on September 19 and again on September 23, according to NASA and the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado Boulder. Analysis of satellite data by NSIDC and NASA showed that, at 1.77 million square miles (4.59 million square kilometers), 2018 effectively tied with 2008 and 2010 for the sixth lowest summertime minimum extent in the satellite record.

An Arctic research expedition faces a carefully orchestrated crew change. Members reflect on how they feel about emerging from the ship into a pandemic, or from social isolation into close quarters.

Sea ice in the Arctic appears to have hit its annual maximum extent after growing through the fall and winter. The 2019 wintertime extent reached on March 13 ties with 2007’s as the 7th smallest extent of winter sea ice in the satellite record, according to scientists at the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center and NASA.

The region, which could provide a last refuge for polar bears and other Arctic wildlife that depends on ice, is not as stable as previously thought, according to a new study.

A proposal to cover Arctic sea ice with layers of tiny hollow glass spheres about the thickness of one human hair would actually accelerate sea-ice loss and warm the climate rather than creating thick ice and lowering the temperature as proponents claim, according to a new study.Sea ice, by reflecting the majority of the sun’s energy back to space, helps regulate ocean and air temperatures and influences ocean circulation. Its area and thickness are of critical importance to Earth’s climate. A 2018 study argued that repeated spreading of hollow glass microspheres on young Arctic sea ice would increase reflectivity, protect…

Ecosystems can draw down carbon and buffer us from the worst effects of climate change — but only if we protect them.

NPR’s Steve Inskeep talks to scientists Melinda Webster with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, about implications for the rest of the globe. She’s on an icebreaker ship to examine ice melt.

New research shows two widely used computer models that predict summer melt pond formation on sea ice greatly overestimate their extent, a key finding as scientists work to make accurate projections about Arctic climate change.

From research stations drifting on ice floes to high-tech aircraft radar, scientists have been tracking the depth of snow that accumulates on Arctic sea ice for almost a century. Now that people are more concerned than ever about what is happening at the poles, research led by the University of Washington and NASA confirms that snow has thinned significantly in the Arctic, particularly on sea ice in western waters near Alaska.A new study, now online in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, combines data collected by ice buoys and NASA aircraft with historic data from ice floes staffed by Soviet…

Not long after the Arctic sun set for the final time last year, a ferocious storm descended on the isolated, icebound crew of the research vessel Polarstern.The polar night filled with the gunshot cracks of fracturing ice and the howls of 60 mph winds. The ship heaved, power cables snapped and a 100-foot meteorology tower toppled. A tremendous fissure opened in the floe to which the Polarstern was fixed, exposing the ocean waves. Researchers scrambled onto the ice to retrieve and restore their instruments.

Buckley, E.M., Farrell, S.L., Herzfeld, U., Webster, M., Trantow, T., Baney, O.N., Duncan, K., Han, H., & M. Lawson (accepted), Observing the evolution of summer melt on multiyear sea ice with ICESat-2 and Sentinel-2, The Cryosphere, 17, 3695–3719, doi: 10.5194/tc-17-3695-2023.Boisvert, L., Webster, M., Parker, C.L., and R.M. Forbes (2023), Rainy days in the Arctic, J. Clim., 36, doi: 10.1175/JCLI-D-22-0428.1MacFarlane, A., Schneebeli, M., Dadic, Tavri, A., Immerz, A., Polashenski, C., Krampe, D., Clemens-Sewall, D., Wagner, D., Perovich, D., Henna-Reetta, H., Raphael, I., Matero, I., Regnery, J., Smith, M., Nicolaus, M., Jaggi, M., Oggier, M., Webster, M., Lehning, M., Kolabutin, N., Itkin,…

For the past five months, Melinda Webster has lived on an icebreaker ship frozen in an ice floe near the North Pole.For Webster, a sea ice geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, it was an ideal observatory. She and a team of 14 other scientists set out, as part of the largest polar expedition ever, to study rapidly disappearing sea ice, which is often shrouded from the view of satellites by thick fog.