This award supports installation of a reliable and economical electrical power supply and heating system for the Barcroft Station, one of several facilities that make up the White Mountain Research Station (WMRS). The power supply, needed for backup and safety during winter conditions, is designed to replace a buried power line that was damaged by a lightning strike in 2002 and may permanently fail in the near future. The systems to be purchased and installed with the aid of this award are a combination of traditional and renewable power supplies, applied in an innovative distributed generation system with modern controls and energy conservation measures. The project was planned in collaboration with the Advanced Power and Energy Program at the University of California at Irvine. The Barcroft Station consists of the Pace Laboratory located at 3,800 meters and a smaller observatory closer to the summit of Barcroft Mountain at 3,975 meters. Barcroft, together with the other WMRS facilities, is unique in the continental United States in providing environmental scientists with a 3,000 meter vertical transect of laboratories separated by less than 20km. The demand for research and educational uses of WMRS as a biological field station has increased dramatically since it was established as a rustic high altitude physiology laboratory in 1950. Over 150 individual researchers and students, half of whom come outside the University of California system, use the WMRS for 6,000 to 9,000 user nights in a typical year. In the last 10 years, over 600 publication have resulted from work in environmental science at WMRS. The station's research portfolio includes not only biological sciences, but also atmospheric, earth, physical and space sciences. The proposed improvements will permit WMRS to maintain, operate and modernize shared research and education infrastructure to stimulate and support the development and dissemination of next-generation instrumentation, multi-user facilities, and other shared research and education platforms. WMRS hosts research from industrial partners, which promotes the transfer of technology between academia and the private sector. The WMRS training programs promote integration of under-represented minorities in field research through, among others, a new partnership with University of Puerto Rico. WMRS also conducts public outreach, and recently produced an hour-long documentary film on the value of the kinds of research conducted at Barcroft.
