Updated:
May 7, 2009

Where we sit now....

The winter work has been fairly quiet. There have been two trips to Barrow, the first in November to repair several sensors that were taken out by the local residents (i.e. Mr. Fox and family), and a second in December to complete the needed repairs. The Barrow site has been troublesome this year and as it stands now the wind and air temp from Small Tower are not working properly. A visit during Feb. 9 - 11 is planned to see if things can't be brought back on-line.

The Imnavait site is working well. A battery change was completed in late December by our friend Glenn Scott with the Institute of Arctic Biology at UAF. Thanks Glenn!

LIDAR - Light Detection and Ranging

Dave Finnegan at CRREL-Hanover is currently working on data that was collected in May and August 2008. In an effort to create some flexibility, and to lighten Dave's work load, Art Gelvin recently attended training to learn on how to run the LIDAR unit. The data covers a large area and is very cool. It's difficult to describe what the data looks like, so here are some screen shots of the data in it's RAW form. As you'll see the level of detail obtained from the data is pretty cool.

A series of LIDAR scans conducted along the 1km transect line. The Wyoming Gauge sits at about the upper right hand corner. Note the number of polygons! Click on the photo above for a larger view. For an even bigger image, click here (1.4mb)
A closer look at the LIDAR data from a different angle. The processing software has a 3-D imaging capability which allows the data to be viewed in 3-D.
A program called Quick Terrain Modeler (QTM) can be used for post-processing. A color map is created based on elevation of the data points. For a larger image, click here ( 1mb)
A contour map was generated in QTM, and then overlaid an rectified aerial photo. The contours match the polygonal shapes.
The final WOW image comes from Dave. This is a picture of all of the data obtained in the two days that the LIDAR was operated in Barrow. Post-processing of the data is on-going and the results should be in soon. For a larger image, click here (1.4mb)

Web Site Updated

The updates to the Web page is a continuing and slow evolving process. The Data page has been update with links to a new page that contains small movies of photos captured by our web cams in Barrow. We've also added a stat counter in order to capture the use of the web site. In the few weeks that the counter was added, we're getting hits from Germany, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, England, and of course the US. Some of the key words being to find us have been snownet, Barrow photos, and NARL whales.

Recent visitor map as of 2/4/2009.