Instead of chasing storms, researchers create their own

The sparkling ice spread through a small stand of trees in the White Mountain National Forest so precisely, it could have been applied by Elsa, Disney’s Frozen queen. Within the basketball courtsize plot, everything glistened. Outside it, branches were bare.

But there’s no magic going on at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, just lots of science. Operated by the USDA Forest Service since 1955, the site is now home to a research project to examine the impact of ice storms, the often beautiful but devastating weather events that reshape forests, damage infrastructure and disrupt lives.

The goal is to study how the storms affect the forestandthe wildlife that dependsonit, and eventually, model the timing and location of future storms.

“People are very concerned about ice storms because they have a huge impact, but we know almost nothing about them,” said Charles Driscoll, one of the project’s researchers and a professor of environmental systems engineering at Syracuse University.

“This is a way we can try to investigate this under a controlled situation, where we can look at different levels of icing and then see what the variable response is to and across an ecosystem.”

To create the ‘storms’, fire hoses drawing water from a brook were mounted onto a pair ATVs that traveled the length of two research plots, spraying a fine mist into the air. Researchers used bright orange buckets to keep track of how much water was applied and gray laundry baskets to catch debris falling from the trees.

While there is some speculation that the ‘ice belt’may shift northward due to climate change, or that ice storms may become more frequent, the jury’s still out, Forest Service research ecologist Lindsey Rustad said.

“That’s part of the project to try to understand the climate and try to understand if we might expect more of these,” said Rustad.

“We don’t know that yet, but weneed people to bemoreproactive rather than reactive in the face of these really devastating winter weather events.”