Marmian Grimes
907-474-7902
1/10/11

The University of Alaska Fairbanks will host a free public lecture, Thursday, Jan. 12 at 7 p.m. in Schaible Auditorium on the UAF campus.

The lecture, “Alaska’s Changing Climate: Should We Be Concerned?,” will feature President’s Professor of Climate Change John Walsh.

The lecture is sponsored by UAF Summer Sessions and Lifelong Learning. For more information, call 907-474-7021 or visit www.uaf.edu/summer.

CONTACT: UAF Summer Sessions at 907-474-7021 or email [email protected].

ON THE WEB: www.uaf.edu/summer

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Ned Rozell
907-474-7468
8/19/2011

As late August brings night back to the far north, our old friend darkness is restoring our view of the aurora, stars and satellites, seen as pinpoints of light streaking through the heavens. In the last 50 years, researchers have blasted thousands of these devices into Earth’s orbit.

In 20 years of existence, the Alaska Satellite Facility at the University of Alaska Fairbanks has gathered millions of data bits from satellites through its giant antennas. Scientists have used the view from space to study things that are hard to see any other way, including the amount of northern sea ice that forms (or fails to form), or the slight inflation of an Aleutian volcano that may hint of an eruption.

All of this action takes place through one of the most noticeable features of the Fairbanks landscape: a 10-meter dish sitting on top of the Elvey Building on the UAF campus, as well as a similar antenna in the woods a bit west of the Elvey Building. The Alaska Satellite Facility has received data from eight NASA satellites, two satellites owned by Canada, a satellite owned by 13 European countries, and a satellite owned by Japan.

When it all began, in August 1991, technicians at the fledgling facility crowded around a computer in Fairbanks and saw islands and giant rafts of ice north of Hudson Bay, Canada, transmitted to them from a satellite 500 miles overhead. They compared the snapshot from above to maps of northern Canada and marveled at the view Alaska’s newest scientific tool provided them. Since then, they’ve offered space-gathered data to scientists all over the world. Just as important, they often convert all those zeroes and ones into products scientists can use. In a recent example, the university’s Franz Meyer crunched numbers into a program that allows scientists to detect inches of movement on the northern sea ice platforms from which people hunt whales and seals.

“This is a major advance and may change how we look at ice stability,” said Hajo Eicken, an ice expert at the Geophysical Institute.

At the time of ASF’s birth, officials at NASA were contemplating sending a new satellite into orbit, but decided a station that could retrieve data from Earth-observing satellites was a better use of their money. They installed the antenna on the top of the eight-story Elvey Building on West Ridge.

Radar sensors on orbiting satellites retrieve images of Earth even through cloud cover or darkness. Riding aboard the Canadian satellite known as RADARSAT-1 is a synthetic aperture radar instrument that sends down microwave pulses that hit glacier, sidewalk, ocean, and other surface features. Those features can either scatter microwave signals or reflect the signals in varying degrees back to the satellites. Calm lakes, for example, tend to bounce the microwaves away. Trees and buildings reflect more of the microwave signal back to the satellite and show up on images as a lighter color than the pure black lakes.

Scientists use ASF data to solve dozens of problems that are hard to tackle from the ground. Researchers with the Alaska-Pacific River Forecast Center in Anchorage use satellite images to monitor ice sheets on the Yukon River; scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used images to check out urban storm water runoff from Los Angeles into Santa Monica Bay; UAF researchers have used the data to monitor ice “break-offs” that could strand Native hunters off Alaska’s northern coast, and NASA researchers used synthetic aperture radar’s ability to see through clouds to make a map of Antarctica.

For those in the Fairbanks area who want to learn more about the Alaska Satellite Facility and help celebrate the 20th anniversary of those first images from north of Hudson Bay, come to the open house on Saturday, August 20, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Elvey Building. The celebration will be easy to find; look for the building with the giant bird dish on top.

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.

Marmian Grimes
907-474-7902
4/3/11

The University of Alaska Fairbanks has announced recipients of the 2011 Emil Usibelli Distinguished Teaching, Research and Public Service Awards.

Gregory Owens, associate professor of mathematics in the College of Rural and Community Development, received the teaching award; Vladimir Romanovsky, professor of geophysics in the College of Natural Science and Mathematics and the Geophysical Institute, received the research award; and Roger Hansen, research professor at the Geophysical Institute and state seismologist and director at the Alaska Earthquake Information Center, received the service award. All three were honored at a reception Monday at the UA Museum of the North.

Owens first joined UAF in 1987 as a developmental math instructor at Student Support Services. He is known for both the high expectations he has for his students and his unwavering support of them. Throughout his career, he has refined his teaching techniques to better serve his students and address their individual learning needs. The developmental math course he created has allowed dozens of students to receive credit-by-exam for a 100-level core math class. His work with these students has been so successful that the math department adopted some of his teaching strategies for the Math 107 course. In addition, he has been an instructor with UAF’s Rural Alaska Honors Institute, a summer college preparatory program for rural high school students, for more than two decades.

“It is his calling and his passion and the students who have benefited from his excellent skills and dedication are now contributing to engineering firms, businesses, schools, tribal organizations and other roles in small and large communities across the state and beyond,” said Sue McHenry, who nominated Owens. “Because he consistently challenges students to stretch themselves past what they may feel their limits are, he teaches more than mathematics, and he impacts how his students view themselves and even how they challenge their children to set goals.”

His skills as an educator are well documented in more than a dozen letters from former students. They cite not only his effectiveness in teaching mathematical concepts, but also his profound effect on their self-confidence, academically, professionally and personally.

“Throughout it all, I have never lost sight of my primary task,” Owens said. “I’m still striving to improve the success rates of students in my classes and their subsequent math courses, because the goal of developmental education is to prepare a capable and diligent lifetime student.”

Owens holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville and a master’s degree in cross-cultural education from UAF.

Romanovsky is among the world leaders in permafrost research. He is consistently sought out as an expert in who can explain complicated concepts to both the public and media and is a frequent collaborator with colleagues in a variety of disciplines.

He began his career in 1975 at Moscow State University. In 1992, he came to UAF as a research assistant at the Geophysical Institute.

His research and collaborative work monitoring permafrost in northern latitudes has provided an important record of change in the Arctic and subarctic and has added to worldwide understanding of climate change. His work also offers valuable contributions to the state.

“The progressive destabilization of some soils, besides directly documenting change in mean annual air temperature, will have dramatic effects on the man-made infrastructure of the Interior,” wrote geology and geophysics department chairman Bernard Oakley in his nomination letter. “Vlad’s work contributes directly to our ability to plan and effectively remediate effects on roads and buildings that are being compromised by the changing climate and plan future construction to minimize these impacts.”

As part of his research work during the last five years, Romanovsky has mentored 22 students and nine postdoctoral researchers and has been listed on more the $10 million in research grants, many of them with an interdisciplinary focus. He also teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses and incorporates his interdisciplinary philosophy into his teaching and service work.

“We are actively collaborating with biologists, soil scientists, hydrologists, biogeochemists, marine scientists, remote sensing scientists and others to promote the system science approach in developing a better understanding of the Arctic,” Romanovsky said.

Romanovsky holds master’s degrees in mathematics and geophysics and a doctorate in geology from Moscow State University and a doctorate in geophysics from UAF.

Hansen is credited as one of the driving forces behind improved earthquake reporting in Alaska. He began his career in the 1970s and served in a variety of positions at public and private organizations in the U.S. and Norway. He came to UAF in 1994.

“At the time, there was little effort made to report information outside the research community,” Hansen said, noting that current practice is quite different. “Response agencies receive critical information about damaging earthquakes in minutes, if not second, via web pages, email, text messages, and fax and telephone. Additionally, using our tsunami modeling capabilities, we are distributing information for the development of evacuation routes and safe zones throughout Alaska’s vulnerable coastal communities.”

Hansen’s outreach and public information efforts cover a wide swath of the population, from public and school tours of his facility, to informational pamphlets and electronic media, to teacher education, to public lectures and media interviews. He serves on multiple public emergency-planning and hazard-mitigation committees and is frequently consulted as an expert in his field. In addition to his public service, he is active on a variety of university committees, all while continuing his own research activities and mentoring graduate students.

Alaska’s seismic observatory is the busiest in the nation, said Geophysical Institute director Roger Smith, who nominated Hansen for the award.

“The measures of success of the observatory are precision of the data, the accuracy of calculations and reliability of the reports,” Smith said. “Under the leadership of Dr. Roger Hansen, the Alaska Earthquake Information Center strives for excellence in these areas and provides outstanding service to the state, nation and the seismological profession.”

Hansen holds bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.

The Emil Usibelli Distinguished Teaching, Research and Public Service Awards are considered one of the university’s most prestigious awards. They represent UAF’s tripartite mission and are funded annually from a $600,000 endowment established by Usibelli Coal Mine in 1992.

Each year, a committee that includes members from the faculty, the student body and a member of the UA Foundation Board of Trustees evaluates the nominees. Each of the winners receives a cash award of $10,000.

NOTE TO EDITORS: Photos of the recipients are available online at www.uafnews.com.

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