In a whirlwind, complex career, one ASR researcher studies Arctic weather and climate at scales both tiny and vast
“I want to go there.”
That’s what eighth-grader Jennifer “Jen” Delamere said one day in 1985 as she watched her father’s home movies of his epic road trip to Alaska. Before her eyes, on the screen in their New Hampshire living room, snow-capped peaks flickered to life, moose towered in dense shrub, and bears loped in the distance. Above all, there were views of the rugged immensity of what is now Denali National Park and Preserve.
And she did go there.
Delamere by now is a veteran student of the arctic environment, snow science, and the atmosphere―an associate research professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF). She is busy these days assisting on a project calculating the changing albedo—reflectivity—of snow and other surface features during spring snowmelt events.
She is also an instrument mentor for the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and a co-investigator on Snow ALbedo eVOlution (SALVO), an ARM field campaign that is part of a related project funded by DOE’s Atmospheric System Research (ASR).
Another of Delamere’s jobs is to direct the Geographic Information Network of Alaska (GINA), a satellite direct-broadcast facility at UAF.
GINA allows her to see near-real-time imagery of Alaska from space every day, including the swirls of developing storms and, in season, the blurry drama of wildfires. GINA harnesses imagery from polar-orbiting satellites. The images are astounding, says Delamere—so much so that “to see it all, every day, live” makes it hard to look away long enough to write code.
That’s another day job: She is part of a multistate team continually improving the computational speed and accuracy of high-performance broadband radiation code for the rapid radiative transfer model (RRTM).
Developed first in the 1990s, RRTM is now in its third generation. Delamere has been part of the model’s development from the beginning. She works with a version called RRTMGP. (The “G” indicates that the version is used in global climate models. The “P” is for parallel processors.)
“I love Alaska,” says Delamere, “and I love a computer.”
Read the full story on ARM.Gov.
# # #Author: Corydon Ireland, Science Writer, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, through the Biological and Environmental Research program as part of the Atmospheric System Research program.