Expedition Seeks to Answer How Warming Will Affect Snow
April 3 -- Matthew Sturm thought he had died and gone to heaven the other day when he gazed across the Arctic landscape, bathed in brilliant light from the midday sun. It was such a lovely day, he recalled later, that the temperature almost got up to freezing.
He's hoping it will stay that way for a while because Sturm is leading an extraordinary expedition across Alaska's forbidding Brooks Range and into the Arctic plain, a trip of nearly 500 miles, all by snowmobile. If all goes according to plan, Sturm and his five associates — including an 8th grade science teacher from Morganton, N.C. — will pull into Barrow, the northernmost town in the United States, by the end of April.
But as a veteran of that part of the globe, Sturm knows that just about anything can happen along the way. Blizzards can blow up out of nowhere, plunging temperatures down to dangerous levels and filling the air with blinding ice crystals, even in April.
"A sunny day at minus 10 with no wind is just glorious," he said shortly before leaving Nome on March 21.
That's easy for a snow scientist to say. For the rest of us, almost any day along the unknown passages through the mountains and to the north would be just plain "nasty," he admits.
Elusive Northern Snow
Sturm, a geophysicist at the U.S. Army's Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory at Fort Wainwright, Alaska, is making this difficult journey for one reason. Scientists really don't know much about the snow that blankets the far north for most of the year. They aren't even sure where it comes from, since there is no obvious source of moisture in a region that qualifies as a desert in every way but temperature.
Worse yet, they know the weather is getting warmer in the Arctic, but they don't know how that will affect the snow.
And that leaves an enormous gap in our understanding of the future of global climate patterns.
"As climate changes, snow is likely to change," he says, but nobody knows exactly how.So scientists usually treat snow like they did clouds in the early days of concern over global warming — they just leave it out of the models. They know that will come back to haunt them eventually, because the Arctic snow cover has a tremendous impact on weather patterns thousands of miles away.
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