Tim Rettig's Blog

On June 29^th I leave for an adventure to Barrow, Alaska.  Barrow is on the “North Slope” of Alaska, and is the northern-most settlement on the North American mainland and in the United States.  Less than 4,000 people live in the area.

I’m going to Barrow to install a high-availability XenServer cluster that is going to run virtual servers which will be collecting weather data wirelessly from weather stations in the area.  The servers will collect the data and then transmit it via a satellite link to servers at the University of Cincinnati.  The project is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a grant to the University of Cincinnati.  The project being directed by Dr. Richard Beck.  My brother Andrew Rettig is organizing the project.  The goal of the project is to improve the collection of weather data in remote locations.  Previously, scientists had to visit expensive isolated weather stations on a regular basis to collect weather data.  Here are some scientists collecting data the old-fasioned way:

This project utilizes off the shelf hardware and software to allow near real-time data collection, while at the same time reducing the cost of a weather station from $40k to under $2k.  The stations will communicate on a localized 700Mhz wireless network back to the Barrow Alaska Research Center (BARC).  Here are the communications towers on the BARC and the wireless network coverage:

This is going to be an adventure for me because not only do I get to setup the servers at the Barrow Alaska Research Center (BARC), but I also get to assist with setting up some of the weather stations out on the tundra.  Luckily we will be doing this work in July, so the temperatures during the day should be above freezing.  Also, the sun is out 24 hours a day right now, so the nighttime temperatures aren’t all that different from the daytime.

Please check back here on a regular basis as I will be updating the site with pictures video and commentary on an almost daily basis during the trip.  If you want a preview of what I might encounter on my trip, check out my post about the liability release I had to sign:  http://blog.timrettig.com/2009/06/07/scariest-release-form-yet/.  You can view all of the Barrow related posts here:  http://blog.timrettig.com/category/barrow/