About me:

I'm a scientist who studies ice & snow, preferably by engineering better observations. I've contributed to (or led) measurements in: Greenland, the Central Arctic, Alaska, the Colorado mountains, and the Beaufort Gyre. While I mostly look at the Arctic, I'm also interested in just about any place or thing that is cold. Which... might be environmental determinism. I'm currently based in Colorado, with laboratories at NOAA and NSIDC. Although lately I spend a lot of time in Leeds too. I believe that better in situ observations will blaze new trails to a more complete understanding of the Arctic. But truthfully, I just like making things and taking pictures. Since really the truth is just a plain picture and what is a picture but an observation anyway.

My research:

When I visit classrooms, I describe my work as "measuring everything you can feel". What is it to feel warm? Is it sunny out? Or is it not-windy? Our bodies are very good at feeling their "energy budget", and if we don't like our energetic state we say we're too warm or cold. The Arctic does this too, but we need to listen better. That's my research: trying to listen. I want to observe the components of "warmth" (energy) and where it goes in the Arctic climate system.

Hopefully these observations help us learn new things. Because learning new things can be pretty fun. I'm also interested in more than the energy budget, since processes like snowfall and atmospheric transport tie to the evolutoin of how energetic exchanges. Since keeping my job requires me to sit atop an ivory tower and use big words, other things I dabble in include: turbulent fluxes at the ice-atmosphere interface, Arctic boundary layer dynamics, remote sensing for cloud microphysics, and energy propogation through the near-surface snow & ice layers.

Beyond the science/physics, quality observations take a lot of engineering effort. This engineering work that ranges from designing new sensors to measure key processes to integrating those sensors into complete platforms that make holistic measurements. So a lot of what I (and my collaborators) do is engineering.

The wider web:

My site...

...was built with 11ty, using Atkinson Hyperlegible font, and is avaliable as open source in this repo (no quality guarantees, I am a scientist after all)