Collaborative Research: SGER: Ice Core Paleoclimate Record from Mt. Waddington, British Columbia Coast Range

这项奖励将利用探索性研究小额赠款(SGER)计划提供的资金，部署一种试验性和移动式取心设备，从山顶的高山地区获得冰芯。沃丁顿位于不列颠哥伦比亚省海岸山脉。该站点拥有获得过去200-1000年来净年降雪量年际变化的连续记录的承诺，但并不确定。这一点很重要，因为如果钻探按计划进行，它将打开一个新的古气候数据档案，供气候研究人员使用。目前，从冰芯进行的古气候研究大多是在极地地区的大型基站上进行的。即使在夏季融雪层形成严重的地区，年度积雪记录也可以很好地保存下来，已被证明是大尺度大气环流模式的有用的量化指标。北太平洋地区的积雪记录特别令人感兴趣，因为它们有可能有助于记录和重建多十年气候变异性。位于山顶下方的战斗上校的冰层裂开了。该项目的资金将与加拿大气候与大气科学基金会(CFCAS)的资金一起使用，该基金会将承担大部分探险费用(即直升机支持、钻探运输、钻探准备和维修)，并提供卫星图像和分析，以及在芒特山附近安装气象站。沃丁顿、中尺度气候模拟和冰川冰流模拟。美国NSF和CFCAS的联合资助是这项SGER请求的一个吸引人的特征，因为它有效地利用了美国的资金，为美国带来了更大的收益。除了实地测试可能对更广泛的科学界产生广泛影响的冰芯钻探新战略外，该项目的数据将有助于定量重建北美西部和北太平洋的气候变化，以及更好地理解冰川物质平衡和水文变化。

This award will use funds made available under the auspices of the Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) program to deploy an experimental and mobile coring apparatus to obtain ice cores from an alpine site atop Mt. Waddington in the British Columbia Coast Range. The site holds the promise, but not the certainty, of obtaining a continuous record of inter-annual variability in net annual snowfall over the last 200-1,000 years. This is important because if the drill works as planned, it will open up a new archive of paleoclimate data to use by climate researchers. At present, most paleoclimate research from ice cores is conducted from large base stations in polar regions. Annual snow accumulation records, which can be well preserved even in areas with significant summer melt-layer formation, have been shown to be useful quantitative indicators of large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns. Snow accumulation records from the North Pacific region are of particular interest because of their potential to contribute to the documentation and reconstruction of multi-decadal climate variability. The ice divide at Combatant Col, below the summit of Mt. Waddington, contains approximately 150 meters of ice and rarely experiences melt at the surface.The funds from this award will be leveraged against funds from the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences (CFCAS), who will bear the majority of the expedition costs (i.e., helicopter support, drill shipment, drill preparations and repair) and provide satellite imagery and analysis, installation of a weather station near Mt. Waddington, mesoscale climate modeling, and glacier ice flow modeling. The co-funding between the US NSF and the CFCAS is an attractive feature of this SGER request because it effectively leverages US funds to derive a bigger bang for the US buck.Besides field testing a new strategy in ice core drilling that could have broad impact on the wider science community, the data from project will aid in the quantitative reconstruction of climate variability in western North America and the North Pacific as well as improved understanding of glacier mass balance and hydrological variability.