EAGER: Robust, Low-power Strategies for Unattended Micrometeorological Buoy Deployments in Extreme Cold and Freezing Spray

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This project is for the testing/development of low-power methods to mitigate the effects of ice and liquid water on the performance and data quality of air-sea momentum and heat flux sensors. It utilizes cold chambers and wind tunnel facilities to develop and test active deicing strategies that have been successfully used in aircraft applications. The techniques will be adapted and optimized for the low-power scenario of an overwinter buoy on Lake Ontario. If successful, this approach could enable direct measurements of momentum, heat and moisture from the lake into the atmosphere during the winter. Such measurements are needed for better modeling and prediction of lake effect snow, which frequently impact communities downwind of the North American Great Lakes, causing loss of life, destruction of property and infrastructure, and commercial and social disruption. Robust, low-power strategies to mitigate ice accumulation on sensors and structures would also have broader applications beyond this research application. This project will partially fund graduate students at SUNY Albany and Penn State who will play an integral role in the testing, and thereby receive valuable training and experience that is part of their graduate education.The overarching scientific goal motivating this project is to improve parameterizations of lake-atmosphere momentum, heat, and moisture fluxes that will lead to better lake effect snow forecasts. Direct measurements of fluxes using the eddy covariance (EC) technique during the winter would be most useful to develop/improve surface flux parameterizations, test research hypotheses, and examine model performance under extreme forcing. To date, difficulties associated with measuring turbulence and fluxes from power-limited platforms during hard winter conditions have precluded collection of such data. As a step toward developing the capability for EC flux measurements in these conditions, this project will adopt a technique from the aviation industry and explore the feasibility of using short, intense pulses of mechanical vibrations and/or heat to dislodge ice or water from the instrument surfaces. These methods will be tested under simulated freezing spray conditions. This de-icing method is expected to be much more power efficient than simply heating the sensors to keep them ice free. If successful, the method is intended to be deployed on buoys with extra buoyancy and high righting moment to resist ice buildup on other parts of the superstructure. The buoys would provide winter time measurements from the ice-free parts of the Great Lakes. Successful demonstration of these techniques will be published in the peer reviewed literature, enabling application by other researchers focused on micrometeorology in extreme environments, and, more broadly, applications where ice mitigation is critical and available power is limited.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.