The night train from Berlin (with me in it) arrived at Wien Meidling at 6h20 the other morning, so I am back at work in Vienna again. 

 

The meeting at Alfred Wegener Institute last Friday was my second occasion to visit Potsdam. The hosting was just as great as the last time, especially the amazingly tasty brunch, including everything from fresh bread and cakes to cheese, dried salmon and home made pesto, that Julia Boike and all the others had prepared! It gave us energy for the whole afternoon. 

 

Participating during the meeting for preparing fieldwork in Samoylov 2013 were Birgit Heim, Anne Morgenstern, Moritz Langer, Sofia Antonova, myself, and also partly Annett Bartsch via Skype.

 

We started off by presenting our current work, as well as our visions of the fieldwork to take place this summer. Sofia Antonova is a PhD student at AWI, who started just a couple of weeks ago and who will be working on the topic subsidence, including so when at the Lena Delta. The two of us will be installing the same kind of stations to measure soil moisture and temperature over time.

 

The topic of Anna Morgenstern is degradation of ice-rich permafrost by thermal erosion, and she is also interested in soil moisture for this purpose. Birgit is my secondary supervisor, together with whom I will be working quite a bit at Samoylov. Annett works with me at TU Vienna, she leads the WP5 and she is my supervisor. 

 

We had some really interesting discussions and exchange that is indeed useful for this summers work. The meeting ended with an improvised course in how to program and use our loggers and sensors, lead by Moritz in his office.

 

Today, I placed an order for additional devices. If all goes as promised it should be ready and delivered well before we have to send all the material. 

 

Thanks to all of you at AWI for hosting this meeting in such a nice way and for the valuable discussions and new information that I gained. Thanks also to Hugues Lantuit, for the little guided tour around the AWI (and for the Berlin tips)!

 

Elin

 

 

 

For the spring we will have Elin Högström blogging on remote sensing and activities around the PAGE21 Young Researches. We will start the blog from the beginning again, repeating Elins first blog, after experiencing some technical difficulties with our website lately and loosing some of our newest articles on the website. 

 

 

 

As a follow-up of last years fieldwork blog (Spasskaya-pad, Kytalyk) I'll be giving you a peek on the indoor work that I do in the remote sensing work package during the rest of the year.

 

I imagine it will be more of a challenge when it comes to interesting photos (office vs. Siberian nature...) But challenges are good things, of course.

 

I really hope you enjoy the reading during the couple of months that I will be running this blog! 

 

Since my research profile was already so nicely presented by Arctic Portal earlier this year  I feel I can comfortably get started without repeating this stuff too much. 

 

The first thing I'd like to share with you here is some good news that I got in the beginning of this year: my application for INTERACT TA for my fieldwork this summer in Samoylov got accepted! It is great to know that I will be able to do this work. I very much look forward to this second occasion to collect material for our project, but also to exchange ideas, experience and knowledge with our PAGE21 partners. 

 

On Friday this week, I will take the train to Berlin for a meeting with some of our partners from AWI, with whom I will cooperate during the work in Samoylov. I'll let you know how it went.

 

Elin