Spring is officially here, but you couldn’t tell by looking out the window. Snow flurries are still common here in Bergen, but days of blue sky are popping up now and then. There is quite a lot of snow which accumulates then melts within 1-3 days, contributing to a lot of runoff that keeps the waterfalls along the fjords full. During the last week of March, I left the relatively warm climate of Bergen and travelled to Northern Finland to join a field study on the micro-climate of an area known as the Kevo nature reserve (69 degrees N, (http://g.co/maps/rr9gz)). The region is of particular interest because of its deep incised valleys that favor the pooling of cold air during clear and calm conditions, thereby creating extreme air temperature inversions (See http://tinyurl.com/bqrkewo). The study was lead by Nick Pepin of the University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom, and joined by two graduate students and 20 undergraduates. Two main goals were achieved during this field campaign. Sediment cores from the surrounding lakes provided ten-thousand years of pollen records, which provides a proxy for mean temperature and primary productivity of the plants. Figure 1, shows the long “Russian cores” being assembled for use on the lake. For the more recent climate, we downloaded data of roughly one-hundred temperature sensors have been deployed during previous years to capture the variations in the temperature inversions of the region. Figure 2 shows Nick Pepin gathering temperature data at one of the stations. During this field work, I was able to converse with Professor Pepin about future collaborative field work to examine the hydrological cycle of the Kevo basin. Although the region has had extensive studies of the local plant and animal life, none have focused on the hydrological impacts of climate change. I am hopeful that we will be able to return to Kevo in order to gather additional measurements of the snowpack and streamflow and utilize the UW’s hydrological models to simulate the unique micro-climate of northern Finland.
Figure 1. Preparation of a Russian sediment sampler to obtain samples from the sediment under 0.5 meters of ice and 10 meters of water.
Figure 2. Nick Pepin and graduate student downloading temperature and solar radiation measurements from an improvised met station (tree).
