Greenland Science Week 2023
At the beginning of November, we had Greenland Science Week which is a conference held across Greenland every two years to present and disseminate research that is happening in Greenland. It’s still a fairly young conference, but it’s focus has remained clear that it is a vehicle for presenting research to the public and not only to other researchers and professionals.
This year, I was lucky enough to get a talk slot and present a summary of the PROMICE and GC-Net weather station work conducted by our department at GEUS. In presenting this work, I couldn’t believe how far we have come with our weather station processing in the three years that I have been working at GEUS. Our processing is encapsulated in our Python toolbox, pypromice, and is now deployed as an operational workflow. The work is far from over, and pypromice is developing continually, but it feels like a massive jump has happened in the past year or so.
The data processing pipeline presented at Greenland Science Week. Data transmissions are collected hourly from our network of weather stations, processed through our operational pipeline, and assimilated into usable datasets. The example dataset presented here is from South Dome station, a two-boom GC-Net station in the middle of the Greenland Ice Sheet.
We also hosted a public outreach event on Earth and Ice to talk to the general public about what GEUS is doing - mainly our department’s activities on the Ice Sheet and research in geology and seismology across the other departments at GEUS. It also marked the 10-year anniversary for the GEUS Nuuk Office. There’s only three of us in the office here in Nuuk, so it’s great that our survival was celebrated with a outreach event that had a great turnout. We had three high school classes come, along with various people from the general public. Our VR experience on the ice sheet and our interactive rock collection were big hits.
The Greenland Science Week outreach event by the GEUS Nuuk Office, with talks, a show-and-tell rock collection, and a VR headset experience of what it is like to visit the middle of the Greenland Ice Sheet.
The next Greenland Science Week is in 2025… I hope next time to be a little bit more prepared and proactive in requesting a more cryosphere-oriented session. There were many cryosphere-related researchers at this year’s Greenland Science Week, and it would be nice to formulate something for all of us to congregate at.