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

该奖项将使用在探索性研究小额赠款（SGER）项目的支持下获得的资金，部署一个实验性和移动的取芯设备，从不列颠哥伦比亚省海岸山脉的沃丁顿山山顶的高山地点获取冰芯。该站点有希望获得过去200- 1000年间年净降雪量年际变化的连续记录，但并不确定。这很重要，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，大多数冰芯古气候研究都是在极地的大型基站上进行的。即使在夏季融雪层形成显著的地区，年积雪记录也能很好地保存下来，已被证明是大尺度大气环流模式的有用定量指标。北太平洋地区的积雪记录特别令人感兴趣，因为它们可能有助于记录和重建多年代际气候变率。位于沃丁顿山峰顶下方的战斗上校的冰沟，大约有150米厚的冰，很少在表面融化。加拿大气候与大气科学基金会（CFCAS）将承担大部分考察费用（即直升机支持、钻机运输、钻机准备和维修），并提供卫星图像和分析，在沃丁顿山附近安装气象站，中尺度气候模型和冰川冰流模型。美国国家科学基金会和CFCAS之间的共同资助是SGER请求的一个有吸引力的特点，因为它有效地利用了美国资金，使美国资金获得更大的回报。除了实地测试一种可能对更广泛的科学界产生广泛影响的冰芯钻探新策略外，该项目的数据将有助于北美西部和北太平洋气候变化的定量重建，以及改善对冰川质量平衡和水文变化的理解。

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.