Black Rock Forest Experimental Snow Research Station
(BRF-ESRS)

Jessie Cherry and Bruno Tremblay

The thermocouple package is pictured on the right under an artificial snowpack. Snow temperatures for a 1 m-deep snowpack are measured every 4 cm and collected by a logger on the tower in the foreground. The fence keeps bears and deer away from the instruments. Click on photo for DETAILS.

The goals of this project are two-fold. The first goal is to study changes in snow depth, distribution, properties, and snowfall over the observation record at Black Rock Forest (BRF) as a possible proxy for changes in the New York City region as a whole. The second goal for this work is to install and test instruments at BRF which we will later deploy in the Arctic. We are interested in questions of climate change and variability in the cryosphere, as well as fundamentals of snow physics. For example, we want to investigate the different mechanism by which heat is transported through the snowpack (i.e. conduction, latent heat transport and wind pumping).

Snow temperature profiles, together with meteorological variables will be used to investigate this problem. Finally, we will study horizontal heat conduction through the snowpack associated with small-scale spatial variability in snow depth, which obscures the interpretation of vertical heat transport estimates derived from internal temperature profiles. Deployment of the thermocouple package on Arctic sea ice is planned for September, 2005.

The thermocouple is pictured on the right with wires to be attached to the logger on the left.