Instrument clusters near Barrow gather climate
change data to help tweak computer models
Credit: Mark Ivey
To help tune up the supercomputing climate models that forecast global warming, Sandia National Laboratories of hot New Mexico has been running a unique atmospheric observatory on the frigid tundra of Alaska’s Arctic coast.
Mark Ivey and Bernie Zak operate two research arrays that gaze into the sky to gauge how clouds influence the Earth’s natural greenhouse gas processes — how they act to insulate and keep heat from radiating into space, how the clouds might also reflect solar radiation away from the Earth.
At stake are some of the most fundamental questions about the greenhouse effect, in one of the most important studies of the International Polar Year.