After our first night’s sleep in a bed, the anticipated chaos associated with our major lidar campaign began. Nick and Jessica from Aerometric showed up in the morning in their Piper Navajo equipped with their lidar unit. The lidar is essentially a laser beam that sweeps left to right as they fly forward, measuring the distance to the ground along a swath determined by the sweep angle of the lidar. In our case, this swath is a few kilometers wide by the time it reaches the ground from 12,000 feet. As they fly, a GPS unit in the plane is used to determine their position, corrected by the ground-based GPS we deployed in the field the day before. We also deployed a few more GPS here in Kaktovik to improve these corrections and give them some preliminary data to use to ensure the day’s acquisitions worked well, since we are only able to check the GPS on the tundra every week or so because they are so far away. We scoped out a number of locations in town and eventually settled on two convenient ones. Unfortunately the weather was not good enough to start actual work today. We need clear skies up to about 13,000 feet.


Nick fires up the Navajo for a first attempt, while Jessica sits in the back and make sure the data is coming in.

The weather seemed better further west, however, and Aerometric had another project lined up, so they took off in the afternoon to see if they could squeeze that project in. Unfortunately during that project, their laptop got fried somehow, and they then discovered that their backup laptop didn’t have all of the necessary software on it. Things got progressively worse, as this was a Canadian national holiday (no joke!), and the software they needed had to come from a Canadian company. So they spent the night in Deadhorse since they were closer to there and the internet was more reliable.

Today they were able to download the software in Deadhorse, but the weather here was still not cooperating. They came back briefly to get their personal things, but decided to spend the next day in Deadhorse. Another Aerometric plane was there and it was broken, so a mechanic was coming in the next day to fix that and they figured this was a good opportunity to also take care of some routine timed maintenance on their plane so that they would not get caught needing to do it in the middle of good weather for our project.

In the meantime here, we began settling into a routine in Kaktovik and sorting out other aspects of the project. Tom the pilot still had not returned, so one major task was to begin trying to line up other aircraft to help us with the aerial photography and GPS work we needed to do. Benny, a professional photographer helping us out, is due to arrive in a few days so we wanted to be sure to have several options lined up. In any case, this is the type of chaos that we anticipated and the reason we were here.


I love Kaktovik. Where else can you offload a 4 wheeler into a loader and climb up into the cockpit to get a photo of it?


Kristin used to be the one wearing the uniform.