Amanda Blunt
Seattle University
Research Mentor: Lucia Upchurch
Project: Arctic aerosol trends at the NOAA Barrow Atmospheric Baseline Observatory
Hello! I am Amanda Blunt and I am an environmental science student at Seattle University. As a 2025 CICOES intern, I worked with Lucia Upchurch in the atmospheric chemistry group at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL). This lab group has monitored aerosol composition in Utqiagvik, Alaska at the Barrow Observatory since 1997 because arctic aerosols play an important role in global climate dynamics.
For the first part of my summer, I assisted with sample analysis which involved weighing filters, performing an extraction, and running the samples on the ion chromatography system. This analysis enables us to determine the concentrations of the various ions of interest in the samples. With the sample processing up to date, I was able to do a full analysis of how the ion concentrations have changed over time since 1997 for the main species of interest for this lab: methanesulfonic acid (MSA) and non-seasalt sulfate. Since this project is part of a long-term aerosol monitoring effort, it is very important for the data to be easily accessible, so the second part of my project was creating a dashboard using the Dash Plotly python library. The dashboard has tools for looking at monthly and seasonal averages of the data as well as species ratios– both things that highlight changes in the aerosol composition more than normal time series plots. Having built a tool to easily explore the trends, I then got the chance to hypothesize and question why some of these changes are occurring and tied the concentrations observed at Barrow to the Beaufort Sea ice extent.
This summer gave me invaluable connections with CICOES and PMEL researchers as well as exposed me to many different niche fields of study. This experience will definitely guide and inform me as I continue in my career in the environmental sciences. I am so grateful that I was able to participate in this program and am excited to see where my fellow interns and I will go next!
Project Introduction
Research Poster
