Editor’s note: Mark Ivey, former manager of ARM’s North Slope of Alaska (NSA) atmospheric observatory and senior engineer at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, provided the following post.
Rob Leland, director of the Sandia Climate Change Security Center, and I hosted DOE Office of Science Director Dr. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe and several of her staff members at the NSA in Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska. They were joined by DOE Arctic Energy Office Director Dr. Erin Whitney and staff from her office, Dr. Brian Benscoter from DOE’s Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program, and representatives from Los Alamos and Oak Ridge national labs. The group was in Utqiaġvik from September 19 to 21, 2023.
Jimmy and Josh Ivanoff, full-time observers at the NSA and residents of Utqiaġvik, provided tours of the NSA facilities. On September 20, Jimmy, Rob, and I provided a morning briefing about ARM at the ARM Duplex, where the NSA site office is located. We had planned a manual balloon launch but had to cancel it because of high winds. We toured ARM radar and lab facilities at the Barrow Arctic Research Center (BARC), talked with a group from the Iḷisaġvik tribal college, and visited the NSA E12 and former Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments (NGEE) Arctic sites just off Cake Eater Road, just south of the NSA main site and NOAA’s Barrow Atmospheric Baseline Observatory.
Dr. Berhe and her team flew back to Anchorage on September 21 after visiting Utqiaġvik. She commented at the airport and in a follow-up email that she greatly enjoyed her visit to Utqiaġvik and her tours of the ARM and former NGEE locations.
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