One adventure after another

Karen St. Germain '87 says she always wanted a career that would be filled with adventures.

Yet, even she probably could not have predicted that a Ph.D. in microwave remote sensing would send her into the eyes of numerous hurricanes, on a snowmobile traverse of Greenland, and across the Weddell Sea on an ice breaker.

St. Germain, who teaches electrical engineering at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, says the adventures allow her to combine her interest in the environment with her love of science.

°I rarely work with other engineers," she says. "One of the great bonuses of my job is that I'm constantly interacting with a whole variety of meteorologists, physicists, and climatologists."

During her senior year at Union, the electrical engineering and physics major went for what she thought would be an interview for a job in the optical communications division at Raytheon, the defense contractor.

This was still the age of the Cold War, though, and when St. Germain arrived at Raytheon she was told that the position that was available was in the missile systems division.

"I wouldn't argue that making missiles did not eventually help lead us on the path to disarmament, but it wasn't really what I was interested in," St. Germain says.

So, instead of entering the military industrial complex, St. Germain headed to graduate school in microwave engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. There, as St. Germain explains it, she would try to figure out how to "observe a target without actually coming into contact with the target." As the end of summer approached, so did hurricane season, which meant that her first research project was about to begin.

Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAH) in Florida were searching for a way to measure the speed of the wind as it rolls across the surface of the ocean's waters during a hurricane. St. Germain and her research team had an idea. When wind rushes across the sea, it creates rough waters and foam, which produce increased radiation. Using a radiometer to measure the amount of radiation, scientists could then accurately estimate the wind speed from an aircraft flying at a safe altitude.

Taking those measurements wasn't the only hard part. "I'd get a call at 2 p.m. telling me there was another hurricane, and at 3 p.m. I'd board a plane to Miami. By 6 a.m., I'd be on a NOAA plane out in the Atlantic so we could start flying through the hurricane."

Although the Orion P-3 aircraft she was in was built to withstand turbulence, St. Germain remembers being "knocked around a bit. I didn't feel like I was in a great deal of danger, but I didn't exactly feel like eating while we were flying."

Further research has taken St. Germain into the neighborhoods of both the North and South Poles to figure out how to measure the thickness of ice. Since the Navy sometimes likes to hide its submarines under the Arctic ice sheets, its submarine captains need to know if the ice will be thin enough to break through when they decide to bring their vessels to the surface. Since the amount of radiation ice gives off is related to its thickness, measuring that radiation using remote sensing systems can enable satellites to map out the thickness of the sea ice throughout the entire Arctic and Antarctic regions.

In the fall of 1989, St. Germain found herself in Antarctica's Weddell Sea aboard a German ice breaker. In one of the lesser known celebrations of the end of the Cold War, the German ice breaker was able to rendezvous with a Russian ice breaker for a cold but memorable party as the Berlin Wall fell.

The ice-measuring technology isn't used just for military purposes. Sea ice also acts as an insulating layer between the relatively warm ocean and the very cold polar atmosphere, making it a critical component of the global climate. In the summer of 1994, when climatologists were interested in the potential thinning of Greenland's ice sheet, St. Germain and a research team headed north with their cold-weather gear for a four-week snowmobile ride across perhaps the iciest country on the globe.

This year, most of her research has been conducted indoors. After receiving a fellowship from NASA this past summer, St. Germain conducted her most recent research at the Goddard Space Center in Greenbelt, Md. There, she and a colleague attempted to use satellite observations to map the temperature of ice across the Arctic oceans.

St. Germain says that these days teaching is her toughest challenge. "It's not as easy as it looks," she reports.

And the future? "You just have to keep yourself open to different opportunities," she says. "NASA exposed me to a lot of new funding sponsors and research programs. As long as there are environmental needs for microwave remote sensing technology, I hope I'll be there to meet them."

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