David Mikolajczyk

You’ve been working with the Antarctic Meteorological Research and Data Center (AMRDC) since you were an undergraduate student. What motivated your interest in the surface meteorology of Antarctica?

Being able to apply those interests along with my interest in meteorology, and to a place so unique and awe-inspiring and mysterious as Antarctica is an awesome opportunity.

What first motivated my interest was just my general desire to study the weather. As a kid, I grew up interested in the weather – and terrified of thunderstorms, actually. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to make atmospheric science and meteorology my focus area of study in college, which led me to University of Wisconsin – Madison (UW). When I began taking my undergraduate courses specifically for the Atmospheric and Oceanic Science major, one of my classmates had already gotten a job at the AMRDC. She told all of us that there was another job opening there, and I had never had a job in weather before, but I thought, “Hey, let's try it out and see what happens”. I ended up getting that job.

Working with Antarctic meteorological data suits me fairly well because I am from Minnesota – I love the winter, I love playing hockey, I've always loved snow and cold weather. Being able to apply those interests along with my interest in meteorology, and to a place so unique and awe-inspiring and mysterious as Antarctica is an awesome opportunity. I've loved every minute of it.

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That's great. It's a common theme in these interviews that people have a certain academic interest, kind of stumble into Antarctic research, and end up loving it.

Yeah, Antarctica is a little bit of an underdog in that it's so far away from the US. Sometimes it escapes people's radar. I like that, too.

Speaking of Antarctica being remote, you work with data from the Antarctic Automatic Weather Station (AWS) program. Can you tell me about this program and explain the fieldwork that is necessary to maintain the AWS network?

Fieldwork is absolutely vital to maintaining the network. It is already hard enough to install one weather station out there, or one piece of observing equipment. Antarctica, as everyone loves to say – and it is very true – “Antarctica is a harsh continent”.

Fieldwork is absolutely vital to maintaining the network. It is already hard enough to install one weather station out there, or one piece of observing equipment. Antarctica, as everyone loves to say – and it is very true – “Antarctica is a harsh continent”. If you put something out there, it will get destroyed very quickly. So, it takes a lot of effort to install and maintain and manage such a large observing network as our Automatic Weather Station (AWS) network. We currently have 57 UW sites throughout the continent, which is about a third to a half of the total automatic weather stations in Antarctica. Other US automatic weather stations are operated by the Naval Information Warfare Center and McMurdo Long Term Ecological Research Project, and nearly twenty other countries have at least a weather station or two. Our group tries to keep track of that as well, and we make a map of all the known automatic weather stations to provide to the public.

The AWS program began in 1980, so is going on 45 years of maintaining these automatic weather stations. As the years go by, and as we keep sites at certain locations, we keep a record of how long it has been since each site was visited. Part of my job is to perform quality control on the data. As I look at the real-time data, I can see if it’s looking good or if something seems to be broken, and then I'll keep a note of that. Then, in our planning for the next field season, we determine which stations we want to go to, to replace that broken wind monitor, for example. Or maybe we know that a temperature sensor is busted, or the power system is failing and we need to replace the batteries. From these logs we have a set list of priority sites that we want to visit.

Then we talk with the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). They're the group through the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs (NSF-OPP) that oversees the logistics. They help organize the logistics that are needed for us to do our work in Antarctica, from the cold weather gear, to travel to the continent, to our lodging at McMurdo Station, to the different transportation methods by which we will visit the AWS sites. Depending on the site location, sometimes it’s a snowmobile ride, or driving a truck on the airfield road, or taking a helicopter. For sites that are even further away, we’ll take a Twin Otter fixed-wing aircraft. As you can probably imagine, there are many moving parts and many people that are involved, and a lot of planning that goes into visiting just one site.

Our group has sent people down to service some portion of the AWS network every austral summer, except for a few years back due to COVID-19 restrictions. We send a field team of at least two people, but usually it's around four. We try to have two field teams of two people each, with a little bit of overlap in between. That helps when we need to do work based out of McMurdo and also work based out of the summer field camp in West Antarctica that USAP sets up.

And to top it all off, we are dependent on the weather. If we have all these plans lined up, but it's cloudy and windy and bad weather at that site, then we're just not going to go at that time. Our field seasons are usually two to three months long, and we try to get to as many sites as we can. Of the 57 in our network, usually we try to visit about half of those sites each season. If we get to half of that – around 20 sites or so – then it's considered a fairly successful season. It takes a lot of effort for sure. It's been amazing that we've been able to keep this network going for so long and to have some observations for more than 30 years at one location. To have that solid climatological record is extremely important, so we're just trying our best to keep that going in as many places as possible.

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It certainly sounds like a huge effort! Do you share data and collaborate with the countries that operate the other automatic weather stations in Antarctica?

We all share data, as is required for anything Antarctic-related. If you gather it, then you should make it publicly available for anyone, and we definitely try to do that. Our AWS network spans almost the whole continent and we do collaborate with a few other countries. We will send them gear and instructions on how to install or maintain a weather station, and they will install it themselves. Over the years, we’ve worked with several other national Antarctic programs, such as the Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition (JARE), the French Polar Institute Paul-Émile Victor (IPEV), and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), in particular. They manage some of our weather stations for us because they already have a research station in the area. They generally do a traverse from their research station inland, and so they’ve put in some weather stations along that route. It is great for us, because we can expand the reach of our network. It's great for them, because then they can get some solid weather station data and real-time observations from where they want to go. It's a great partnership.

The more knowledge sharing the better. Especially down there, you want everyone to succeed.

That’s a really good example of the international collaboration that is so important for Antarctic research.

Absolutely. The more knowledge sharing the better. Especially down there, you want everyone to succeed. It's hard to learn those lessons and avoid mistakes on your own without a lot of trial and error, so the more collaboration the better.

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Do you have any favorite memories from your nine field seasons?

It's very hard to choose. I think the top is seeing penguins, for sure. Penguins are amazing and Adélie penguins are super cute. I think one of my favorite times seeing them was at McMurdo in the late summer, probably around January. The sea ice in McMurdo Sound had broken up and it was a warm, sunny evening. I was on the “beach” at McMurdo, looking out and seeing Adélie penguins just hanging out on the floating sea ice out there, and it was very peaceful and calm and tranquil.

One of the benefits of our work in Antarctica is that we get to travel to all these different remote regions that few other people ever get to see. It's an amazing experience and opportunity. Even just flying to a site, even if it's in the middle of the Ross Ice Shelf, which is a huge flat expanse of ice, that itself is pretty amazing. Another one of my favorite sites to service is the AWS at Cape Hallett. That is a beautiful region. The weather station itself is basically at sea level, but there are a lot of surrounding mountains nearby, plus an Adélie penguin rookery. The magnitude of the mountains is just incredible. I could keep going, but those are probably some of my favorite memories.

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That's awesome. I did Antarctic fieldwork for the first time and was at Palmer Station for a few days this October. It was so cool to see the penguins waddling around station. Based on your description of your fieldwork, it sounds like a lot of hands-on and mechanical work. Did you have those skills already, or were they something you had to develop as a means to achieving your academic goals?

And that, I think, is an amazing aspect of this job in particular. I can learn about the different weather processes, and then I can see how we might collect that data with different temperature sensors and pressure sensors. And then I can see the data coming in real time...

Oh, yeah, and penguins never get old, either. Even during my ninth field season, I was always looking for them on the horizon.

As for effectively maintaining the AWS network, that I learned more on the job. I mostly learned from my coworkers, in particular Lee Welhouse, who has been working at the AMRDC for a few years longer than I have and is now the lead field season engineer. He helped me a lot with how to do the different instrumentation fixes, learn about the data loggers, how all of that works. It is way different than studying, for example, mid-latitude cyclones. And that, I think, is an amazing aspect of this job in particular. I can learn about the different weather processes, and then I can see how we might collect that data with different temperature sensors and pressure sensors. And then I can see the data coming in real time and I can quality control it. And then we see things like a huge temperature increase in March in the middle of the East Antarctic plateau, and then we can investigate how that happened.

Can you tell me more about your research, which focuses on using Antarctic AWS observations to study rapid warming events observed across the continent? Why is it important to study and document exceptional weather events?

For one thing, having an observational data record of any kind over Antarctica is incredibly important, valuable, and a feat in and of itself. Since our stations are at the surface of the continent, the AWS network provides data that gives us a really good idea of how the atmosphere is interacting with the surface and with the ice sheet itself. With our network covering regions of the Antarctic spanning from the coast to further inland into the big East Antarctic ice sheet, that helps us see how those weather systems can affect regions so far inland.

For example, I am a co-author on a recent paper (Wille et al., 2024) investigating an extreme heat wave that occurred in 2022. Our weather station at Dome C II, which is a big dome of ice far inland on the East Antarctic ice sheet, showed that temperatures practically got to the melting point. The high temperature during that heat wave was -9.4 °C, while usually at that time of year it's around negative 50 or 60 °C. So, it was an incredible, extreme event. This paper also describes weather phenomena in the tropics, subtropics, and mid-latitudes of the globe, and how those can propagate and affect regions far afield, such as Antarctica. Ultimately, if we can have this continuous data record for years and decades, then, as we notice these extreme events either happening more often or less often, we're able to study why they’re happening. These data help us understand the causes and effects and consequences of different weather processes around the world.

Antarctica is a big piece of the puzzle of global climate, and you can't ignore that piece, or else you'll never solve it.

It's so interesting how Antarctic weather is related to what’s going on in the mid-latitudes, especially given your previous comment about how people don’t often think much about Antarctica because it's so far away.

Yeah, absolutely. And one big consequence of warmer temperatures around Antarctica that directly affects the whole world is ice sheet melting and its effect on ocean currents. Antarctica is a big piece of the puzzle of global climate, and you can't ignore that piece, or else you'll never solve it.

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I study Southern Ocean paleoceanography, so I appreciate that. Now, thinking about the research community, you attended the online SCAR Open Science Conference in 2022 and the US Antarctic Science Meeting in 2023. What were your impressions of the Antarctic research community at those meetings?

It's such a small community, but somehow there is so much going on. Everyone is so passionate about their area of research...

Very welcoming and very tight knit. Everyone is extremely open to hearing any and all ideas related to Antarctic science. That's one thing that I've come to appreciate a lot with SCAR meetings or any other Antarctic-related meetings. It's such a small community, but somehow there is so much going on. Everyone is so passionate about their area of research, and it is amazing to hear all the work that other scientists do. It’s invigorating to go to these meetings and learn not just about the atmospheric sciences, but also different topics. I love doing this work, and so do these people. It's pretty cool.

For our last question, what advice would you give to early career scientists who want to get involved in Antarctic research?    

I would say, first, keep your eye on the prize. Sometimes it might seem like your end goal is far away, or you're doing something that is totally unrelated to what you want to achieve. One example I can kind of think of for me personally is taking a computer science class in undergrad. I did not like it at all, and it was very difficult for me. I remember telling myself, “I really do not like this, and I hope I don't have to do a lot of this for my career”. Turns out, I kind of do. I was able to get through that class, and I realized that even if you don't like something, even if something comes difficult to you, there are countless people who want to help you learn what you need to learn and do what you need to do so you can succeed. Especially at the beginning of your studies, it can be easy to feel like you're isolated and alone, or that this challenging class wants you to fail. But that's not the case. As I mentioned before, the community is so tight knit and there are so many people who want to help you out. Even if things are a struggle, there is always help out there, so stick with it.

There are also a wide variety of ways to research Antarctica. There are numerous different scientific disciplines to apply to Antarctic research, and different ways that you can apply your skills within each discipline. Keep your mind open to any new possibilities and ventures that you might want to get into, and things will probably work out.

Great advice. Thank you for speaking with me, and for your important work with the AMRDC and AWS network.