Monitoring Lemon Glacier Using a Wireless Sensor Network in Juneau, Alaska: The SEAMONSTER Project

Measurements of annual change in the Lemon Glacier near Juneau, Alaska have been made through the South East Alaska Monitoring Network for Science, Telecommunications, Education and Research (SEAMONSTER) project at the University Alaska Southeast. This effort has two types of direct relevance to climate change research. First, modeling combined with synoptic instrumentation of Lemon Glacier is designed to characterize the coupling of climate forcing to sub-glacial hydrology, glacier dynamics, mass transport, and mass balance. The specific means include monitoring precipitation input (met stations), supra-glacial lake drainage (pressure transducers), glacier discharge (stream gauges), and surface velocities (GPS), and using this data to fine-tune a site-customized melt model. Insights from this work can be scaled and extended to glaciers in the Gulf of Alaska and Greenland where increased melting and lake discharge events are altering ice distribution on volume scales significantly relevant to global sea level. The second, more indirect influence of this project on global climate research is via technology integration and documentation. Integrating new hardware and IT infrastructure is deemed an insufficient contribution to our increasingly inter-dependent and multidisciplinary geoscience/cryosphere research community. The project philosophy is to carefully document and openly share system architecture, software, hardware design, and harvested data via web servers, wikis, and direct collaboration with other people and organizations. http://robfatland.net/seamonster/ Overall, the SEAMONSTER project provides a model for adaptive, real-time data acquisition and sharing that could be applied to a wide variety of climate change research efforts.