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Leadership Update
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It has been nearly a year since our last Newsletter, which is partly because we initiated Monthly Updates of recent publications, data products and related information (e.g. media attention, meetings, job announcements), and will continue to do so. Nonetheless, the Newsletter is useful for stepping back and reflecting on what we’ve accomplished over a longer timeframe. For example, since our Science Team Meeting in San Diego this past January, some 28 peer-reviewed ABoVE publications have come out, including 6 papers in the ABoVE Focus Collection of Environmental Research Letters (which now includes over 100 papers). In addition, there were 11 new data sets archived at the ORNL DAAC in the last year, and substantial progress on various synthesis activities advanced by ABoVE thematic working groups (most of which meet on a monthly basis). We also arranged 2 webinars held as part of our regional webinar speaker series (one NWT-focused, and one AK-focused) and, of course, had a big turnout at last December’s annual AGU meeting, with 40 presentations in 4 oral sessions coupled with dozens of eLightning and poster presentations. We have a similar number of presentations and posters lined up in our session this year (see this link for the first of 7 time slots), convened by Liz Hoy, Abhishek Chatterjee, Nancy French, Michelle Mack, and Jonathan Wang. We are pleased to see the sustained interest in these sessions, which are among the largest of the meeting across all disciplines. Moreover, we conducted coordinated field and airborne campaigns again this past summer (more details can be found in this newsletter) and also coordinated with two SnowEx campaigns in April and October (see the ABoVE SnowEx site for details, including lots of great photos). In leadership team news, Hank Margolis, the Terrestrial Ecology Program Manager responsible for ABoVE, has announced his intention to retire at the end of calendar year 2023 after more than 8 years on the job. NASA Headquarters is in the process of recruiting his replacement. We thank Hank for his leadership and guidance for ABoVE, and wish him the very best in his retirement. We appreciate what each of you contribute to our collective effort to better understand the vulnerability and resilience of northern ecosystems, from field studies to terrestrial biosphere models. We look forward to seeing many of you in San Francisco for the AGU meeting, hope to see you online at one of our webinar series or working group meetings, and then at ASTM10 in Boulder, 21-24 May 2024.. We are now a year into Phase-3 and the results indicate another banner year lies ahead for ABoVE research! Please be in touch if we can help in any way, and remember we are always open to suggestions for how we can do our part better. - Scott, Chip, Peter, Libby, Liz, Dan, and Hank |
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The Passing of Jason Edwards
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It is with great sadness that we write to let the ABoVE Team know of the sudden passing of our Canadian Forest Service colleague, Jason Edwards, who was part of CFS and the Northern Forestry Centre in various ways over the past 20 years. Jason was the CFS liaison to ABoVE and attended many of our Science Team meetings to report on the research efforts of these organizations and ways to help link our mutual efforts. He was a friend and colleague to many of us and will be greatly missed. If you would like to find out about efforts to honor Jason and to support his family at this difficult time, contact catherine.mcnalty@NRCan-RNCan.gc.ca |
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Publication Highlights |
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ABoVE research continues to move apace, with 28 peer-reviewed publications to date this year, including ones in Nature Climate Change, Global Change Biology, Biogeosciences, and Environmental Research Letters, several of which we highlight here. Are your pubs up to date? We strongly encourage everyone to both peruse and report their project publications to the ABoVE website.
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The 2023 ABoVE Airborne Campaign returns to Alaska and CanadaContributed by Charles Miller and Peter Griffith
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NASA’s Terrestrial Ecology Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) team executed its fifth airborne campaign during July-August 2023. The team acquired hyperspectral imagery from the AVIRIS-3 instrument. These acquisitions were guided by the requirements of the ABoVE Phase 3 investigations and requests from ABoVE partners in the U.S. and Canada. The new data complement that collected during the ABoVE airborne campaigns executed in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2022. The Dynamic Aviation B-200 aircraft N53W was based in Fairbanks, AK. About 80% of the areas of interest near Fairbanks and north to Deadhorse were collected. The NGEE-Arctic sites on the Seward Peninsula were collected, and sites near Kotzebue, Noatak, and Atqasuk were completed. Good weather forecast for Utqiagvik led the team to try overnighting there but the aircraft developed mechanical problems which led to a week of down time for repairs, after which the weather failed to cooperate. Favorable conditions in southern Yukon allowed science flights to Whitehorse and points south to Skagway, AK. Extraordinary wildfires in Canada prevented planned sorties in northern Yukon and in the Northwest Territories.
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ABoVE Logistics Support Update
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ABoVE Science Team Meeting in 2024
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ABoVE Internship Updates
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Since 2015 ABoVE has sponsored summer internships either in-person at Goddard Space Flight Center, or virtually, to provide training and research opportunities in Arctic science and remote sensing. Students complete projects designed to meet the science goals and objectives of ABoVE, and which foster collaboration and engagement with team members, local communities, and decision-makers within the study domain.
(Rolling acceptance. Applicants must be a current or rising senior or graduate student, U.S. citizen, and have a GPA of 3.0 or greater.) Many former interns have been able to present their research at conferences and are working to publish in scientific journals as co-authors. Learn more about ABoVE internships here. Some recent intern updates include:
Upcoming AGU Fall Meeting Presentations by former interns including Leah Clayton and Miles Moore. |
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Early Career Spotlight
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Dong (Tony) Chen is an Associate Research Professor at the Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park. His research primarily focuses on understanding the various impacts of wildfires in the northern ecosystems (i.e., boreal forests and tundra) based on remote sensing and field data. Recently, he has led a project to establish a modeling framework to estimate wildfire-emitted PM2.5 concentrations at the daily interval for the vast northern areas. The output from this project offers direct and quantitative evidence that wildfire is the dominant driver of PM2.5 concentration dynamics in northern lands during the fire season. Dong’s research interest also involves improving the accuracy of remote sensing in mapping northern wildfires. He has led a series of efforts looking into the applications of commonly used burn severity indices including the differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR). He is currently leading a project to create an Arctic-specific burned area data called the Arctic Boreal Burned Area (ABBA) product. In addition to conducting research, Dong is actively involved in various ABoVE-related activities. He is the lead of ABoVE’s Disturbance Working Group. In this position, he has been curating a monthly webinar series where authors of relevant publications present their recent work. He has also led a tundra synthesis activity which yielded a compiled dataset that contains field data collected in Alaskan tundra over the past half century. A full list of his publications can be found here. Ludda Ludwig is a PhD candidate in the Earth and Environmental Science department at Columbia University. Her interests are in scaling methane and carbon dioxide emissions, climate change impacts on high-latitude carbon cycling through wildfires and permafrost thaw, and coupled biogeochemical cycling at terrestrial-aquatic interfaces. She uses a blend of research tools including fieldwork measurements, remote sensing, and machine learning, and generally loves finding new ways to apply statistics to research questions. Some examples of her PhD work include investigating wildfire effects on biogeochemical and watershed drivers of inland aquatic CO2 and CH4 and improving bottom-up scaling for waterbody CO2 and CH4 fluxes to the atmosphere. Her most recent PhD work is a preprint on developing an approach to un-mixing eddy covariance fluxes of CO2 and CH4 from heterogeneous tundra, including a comparison using different underlying landcover maps, improved performance with gap-filling, and consequences for scaling up to regional carbon budgets. A full list of her publications can be found here. Rebecca Scholten is an ABoVE-affiliated PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands, exploring the dynamic relationship between arctic-boreal fires and climate warming. Her research combines field data and satellite imagery to understand shifts in high-latitude fire patterns, placing a special emphasis on extreme fire events. This recent research has pointed to the influence of early snowmelt and an anomalous Arctic front jet on the high temperatures and dry conditions seen during recent extreme fire seasons in Siberia. During her PhD she took part in multiple field campaigns gathering unique data on carbon emissions from boreal forest and tundra fires in Siberia, Canada and Alaska. Some of her research has explored the impact of overwintering fires in boreal forests. Prior to her PhD work, she conducted research on ecosystem disturbances and environmental challenges in temperate regions at Scion Research Institute in New Zealand and the Joint Research Center in Italy. A full list of her publications can be found here. |
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Peter Griffith: Diving Into Carbon Cycle Science
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Dr. Peter Griffith is featured in the People of Goddard series.
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ABoVE Jobs
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Multiple job openings with ABoVE Projects. Here are two highlights:
Faculty Cluster Hire at Northern Arizona University
Postdoctoral Scholar If you would like to post a position, email Support. |
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Published ABoVE Data
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Published ABoVE data archived at ORNL DAAC have been accessed 74,639 times by a total of 14,459 unique users (identified by IP address) since January 2015. A total of 180 field, airborne, and modeled data products from ABoVE research are now available from the ORNL DAAC. In the last year, 11 ABoVE datasets have been archived at the ORNL DAAC and 12 ABoVE preprint datasets have been released to support the peer-review process for manuscripts. ABoVE datasets have been cited 149 times by other publications thus far in the campaign. Browse ABoVE data at the ORNL DAAC. As a reminder, the LVIS data collected for ABoVE are available from the NSIDC DAAC and UAVSAR data are archived at the Alaska Satellite Facility.
ABoVE: Fractional Open Water Cover for Pan-Arctic and ABoVE-Domain Regions, 2002-2015
2,098 downloads
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NASA Stories and Media Coverage
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ABoVE has been getting a lot of attention in the Media and NASA's news team. Check out what has been covered!
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ABoVE Jobs
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Multiple job openings with ABoVE Projects. If you would like to post a position, email support@cce.nasa.gov.
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