Braving The Cold of The North

(Contributed photo via UND Today)

(By Averie Eixenberger. UND Today) – Kennedy, associate professor and chair of Atmospheric Sciences at UND, went to Iceland as a recipient of a Fulbright Iceland-National Science Foundation Arctic Research Grant, a Fulbright U.S. Scholar program for the 2024-2025 academic year. When he initially spent his academic year aboard, his goal was to use his self-developed instrument to study and predict the potential for dangerous avalanches. However, that winter did not provide the ideal conditions for getting the necessary research, making more data collection necessary to achieve the initial goal.

“From a personal goal, I thought it was an extreme success because I got to understand how to improve my instrument and make it more robust,” explained Kennedy. “It taught me some more about the right design to use; but from a science perspective on the avalanche side, we didn’t really get the data to see how useful this information would be.

“And so, the goal of extending our data for an additional winter is to try to have a more typical Icelandic winter, and then hopefully get the data collected so that we can publish some papers about how this would be useful for avalanche forecasting.”

In August, Kennedy returned to Iceland with graduate students Talia Kurtz and Alec Sczepanski to set up the instruments for another year of data collection.

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