Gabriel Wolken is a research professor at the University of Alaska Fairbank’s Climate Adaptation Science Center and manager of the State of Alaska’s Climate and Cryosphere Hazards Program.
One of the big projects his research team is working on now involves using drone data to visualize and predict a glacial lake’s activities. Specifically, they need to know how its seasonal flux impacts a nearby community and its vital infrastructure.
They’ve been working since 2015 through challenging conditions with various aerial survey methods, and in 2019 Wolken learned about WingtraOne. He immediately recognized it as a new opportunity for more frequent, high-accuracy data capture
WingtraOne provided an interesting option for us for many of our research objectives. Its VTOL allowed us to operate from the glacier and from one of the rock ledges. Since it’s also a fixed-wing, we could fly higher, longer, and with a payload that gave us the outputs we needed to achieve.
Gabriel Wolken,Research professor, University of Alaska Fairbank’s Climate Adaptation Center
Just outside Juneau, Alaska, sits the Mendenhall Glacier, a massive body of ice stretching 21 km (13 mi). It was once connected to another body of ice, called Suicide Glacier. But over the past 80 years, Suicide Glacier has retreated. In the wake of this movement, it left a piece of itself in a deep basin. Beneath this remnant ice, the “Suicide Basin” reservoir fills with water. All of this is held in place by the Mendenhall Glacier, which is still sitting right next to it.
This point—where the basin and Mendenhall Glacier meet—is the target area where the team is conducting many lines of remote sensing to detect the change in the lake level, Wolken said.
“The main issue is that it’s ice covered so we can’t really see the water as it fills up the basin on a seasonal basis,” he explained. “WingtraOne covers a large area, efficiently and provides data that is high quality in terms of visualization and location accuracy.”
Key to all of this is how Mendenhall Glacier functions as a dam that contains the water in the basin. When the water gets too high, it either flows over it or pushes it up from below due to massive amounts of hydraulic pressure that builds up.
“And then, in a catastrophic event, the water drains,” Wolken explained. “The entire lake drains over about a day and a half, and floods the infrastructure and community down below.”
Glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) began in 2011. The flooding has damaged infrastructure and homes in the valley by Suicide Basin. In 2015, Wolken was part of the first assessment of the area. In 2018 more agencies—including the US Geological Survey Field Office in Juneau, and the International Arctic Research Center among others—started to get involved.
“This flooding potentially threatens a bridge that is connected to the road system,” Wolken said. “And this is the only road that would connect residents on the north side to hospitals and other vital facilities, so if this bridge was impacted it would cause some very serious issues for a lot of people.”
In addition to helicopter-based photogrammetry, Wolken and his team have conducted LIDAR surveys with manned aircraft and have also used quadcopters.
But when Wolken learned about WingtraOne during a fellowship in Davos, he saw a solution that suited the broad coverage these basin surveys demand and offered the possibility of more frequent data capture missions.
The helicopter surveys they had been conducting cost around 3,500 USD and were only possible annually. The nature of this study requires more frequent surveys of the area to recognize elevation change patterns that indicate water filling the basin under the glacier that is responsible for the downstream flooding.
Source: Press Release