The motivation for starting this blog is to have a creative outlet for long form content. This was nucleated by a work trip to Utqiagvik (Barrow) Alaska on a project we are sub-contracting to the Concord Consortium on an NSF eduction grant called Precipitating Change. So what is so exciting about Barrow Alaska? For starters it is home to an ARM Research site, the Northernmost of its fixed network. Second it is the Northern-most city in the United States at 71.29 North, well above the Arctic circle. Yes, it will be dark the whole time we are there.. Well we will get some twilight.

And this makes for some very interesting meteorology. In places where the sun comes up we are used to the normal daily dance of the ground heating up and an equilibrium developing between warm air at the surface and colder air above. There are eddys that form that transport heat that develop a change in temperature with height (~1 degree per 100 meters). But no sun = some very funky temperature profiles! This effectively decouples layers of the atmosphere from the surface allowing for great cloud structures as talked about by Dr Joseph Hardin at last years ERAD.

More on the great weather (it’s actually looking ok for our trip with temperatures when we land around -19ºC) later. This trip is to observe 8th graders at the North Slop Borough Middle School interact with a curriculum we have been developing. The key to the curriculum: using the weather to teach computational thinking. Students observe weather phenomena, specifically large-scale circulations (Highs, Lows, Fronts), how they move and build forecasting rules of thumb. They reason out what should happen next at their location: Should it get warmer? Colder? Wetter? Dryer? Our plucky team (part of the larger project) is led by Meridith Bruozas from Educational Programs and Outreach at Argonne National Lab. I am not an education expert.. but I do ok at outreach. So this is new territory for me, both professionally and geographically. I am uncomfortable and I could not be happier!