Von Walden
Washington State University, WA·Earth & Environmental Science
Greenland's ice sheet is losing mass as the Arctic warms, and its meltwater raises global sea level. How much melt occurs depends on clouds, sunlight, heat exchange with the air, and snowfall.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
- Topics
Greenland Ice Sheet
Summit Station
ICECAPS-MELT
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Continue the ICECAPS ground-based record at Summit Station of cloud properties, radiation, surface energy and precipitation over the Greenland Ice Sheet.
- Build and deploy an autonomous, low-power mobile observatory with precipitation radar, cloud lidar, microwave radiometer, ground-penetrating radar and a surface flux station at Summit and at DYE-2 in the meltwater percolation zone.
- Use air-parcel trajectory analyses to determine how surface mass and energy budgets co-vary in space and time between the dry-snow and percolation zones.
- Represent researchers' needs in Summit Station planning and recapitalization, protecting clean-air and clean-snow areas while accommodating new astrophysics research, and maintain community resources such as a GIS map and investigator onboarding.
More about the research
Measuring these on a remote ice sheet is difficult. One project here collects these atmospheric and surface measurements. The other coordinates the scientific community that uses Summit Station, a year-round research base high on the ice sheet.
Why it matters
Melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet contributes significantly to global sea-level rise, which is expected to affect people substantially over the next century, especially in coastal communities. Measurements of how clouds, radiation and snowfall drive surface melt and refreezing could improve understanding of how the ice sheet responds to a changing Arctic. Coordinating Summit Station helps protect a long-term clean-air and clean-snow research site.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Collaborative Research: Greenland Dry-snow Ice-sheet Science Coordination Office
NSF · May 2023 – Apr 2027
Collaborative Research: NSFGEO-NERC: Integrated Characterization of Energy, Clouds, Atmospheric state, and Precipitation at Summit: Measurements along Lagrangian Transects
NSF · Dec 2021 – Nov 2026
Closest labs
John Cassano
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Earth & Environmental Science
Collect year-round, autonomous atmospheric and surface measurements from an instrumented 30-meter tall tower at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide field camp, to track how the lowest layer of air exchanges heat with the ice.
Qinghua Ding
University of California-Santa Barbara, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
Develop regional models of summertime Arctic sea ice that combine global observational data through machine learning, to forecast ice from weeks to a season ahead and find how far ahead prediction is possible.
Robert DeConto
University of Massachusetts, MA·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether the northern Greenland Ice Sheet is more sensitive to Arctic warming than the southern ice sheet, by drilling through the ice and measuring cosmogenic nuclides such as beryllium-10 and aluminum-26 in the bedrock below to find past ice-free periods.
The school
Washington State University: 22 labs on PI Pages, $403M a year on research, 259 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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