Month: June 2024

Jen, Andrew, Ben Wiebe, and George Koch made an afternoon trip out to NAU’s historic Hat Ranch property, located just west of Williams, AZ about an hour from Flagstaff. The goal was scouting and logistics planning in support of The Great Thermal Bakeoff workshop that Jen is leading in August.

A highlight of the visit was seeing some of the magnificent alligator juniper (Juniperus deppeana) trees at the Ranch, including the gnarly multi-stemmed beauty shown in the picture below (note the live bark and foliage on the left most stem).

A big thanks to DAPS faculty member Mark Salvatore for serving as tour guide (and photographer).

In mid-June, a team of scientists from NOAA’s Boulder, CO, office visited Flagstaff. Led by Tilden Meyers and Dave Turner, the group was conducting a scouting trip to identify possible field sites for an extensive array of new instrumentation to study boundary layer processes, land-atmosphere interactions, and fire weather dynamics. Andrew met up with the group during their tour of the Flagstaff Arboretum, which was provided by Arboretum Director Nate O’Meara.

In early June, Mariah, Austin, Alatna, and Andrew traveled to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, CO, for field work and a team meeting with collaborators (Adrianna Foster and Will Wieder from NCAR, and Ben Lucas from NAU) on Mariah’s DOE ESS project on Snodgrass Mountain. During four grueling days of field work, all walkie-talkie calls were initiated with the familiar cry of “Calling all Snoddies!” With beautiful weather, the aspen leaves just coming out, and wild flowers blooming, it was a great week.

Funded by a new grant from Save the Redwoods League, and with field support from Steve Sillett and Marie Antoine of Cal Poly Humboldt, Andrew and George Koch spent a week near Carmel Valley, CA, setting up instruments, data loggers, and wireless communications hardware in the tops of six magnificent Sequoia sempervirens trees. The project studies relationships between the presence of fog and wood growth.

The first photo shows Steve, George, and Marie in the redwood grove, and the second shows Marie installing a solar panel at the top of “Tree 5.”