OMG’s first two years of operations already collected the most comprehensive data available on the subject, but OMG Principal Investigator Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, is hungry for more. “We’re beginning to see some surprising changes in the ocean, just since the start of OMG in 2016, that are affecting the ice,” said Willis, an oceanographer at JPL. “We want to see if those changes are still there after two years, and if they’re spreading farther along the Greenland coast.”

Willis and Project Manager Steve Dinardo, also of JPL, are leaving for Greenland this week on an airborne campaign to do just that. For the third year in a row, they will drop about 250 probes just offshore all around the island, with some drops close to the fronts of ocean-terminating glaciers. The probes sink 3,000 feet (1,000 meters) into the seawater, recording temperature and salinity as they go. The researchers hope to make their first flight on Aug 22 and complete the work in two to three weeks, depending on weather.

Beating the Weather

Unfortunately for OMG, the best time to drop probes into the ocean around Greenland — the time with the most open water — is during hurricane season. “Hurricanes go up to Greenland to die,” said Dinardo. “In 2016, there were days the winds were so strong we couldn’t even open the hangar doors.” Weather groundings stretched the planned three-week deployment to five weeks.

In 2017, weather struck closer to home: Hurricane Harvey sidelined the Houston-based plane and crew just days before the campaign was scheduled to begin. Dinardo managed to locate a viable alternative aircraft and get the OMG team airborne within a month of the originally planned start.

This year’s new plane and new base should improve OMG’s weather odds. The plane, a Basler BT-67 operated by NASA contractor Airtec, can take off and land on a shorter runway than either of the planes OMG previously used. That allows the team to base their east coast operations in Kulusuk, a small airport in southeastern Greenland, rather than a larger airport in Iceland. The lengthy “commute” from Iceland cut into the time available for research on each flight, and the longer flight path meant more places where there might be bad weather.

When they complete the east coast drops, the team will move to Thule, a U.S. air base in northwestern Greenland, for drops on the western side of the island.

“Being in Greenland the whole time, we can get a little more up close and personal with the ice sheet and glaciers,” Willis said.

OMG and Narwhals

The changing ocean around Greenland affects living creatures as well as glaciers. Narwhals — smallish whales with long single tusks — are uniquely adapted to Arctic waters, moving seasonally from the open ocean to the glacier fronts of Greenland and Canada. Kristin Laidre, a research scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, studies these elusive mammals and their habitats. She quickly saw the value of OMG’s observations, publishing the first peer-reviewed paper to use OMG data.

Laidre and Ian Fenty of JPL, an OMG co-principal investigator, are on the west side of Greenland from the airborne OMG team this week, on a six-day research cruise. Their team will place moorings in front of three important glaciers in northwestern Greenland, with acoustic recorders and OMG data loggers attached to the mooring chains. These instruments will log ocean temperature and conductivity (used to calculate salinity) and detections of narwhals.

This intensive local data set is likely to add new insights into OMG’s larger-scale measurements, Fenty said. “Because the instruments will take measurements every hour for two years, we will get a totally new understanding of the changing ocean close to the ice,” he noted. “These data will help us interpret our OMG probe data and allow us to evaluate and improve our [computer] simulations of the ocean currents in the area.”

Laidre said, “We don’t know a lot about what’s important to narwhals — how physical oceanography influences their habitat preferences. OMG is collecting really detailed information on the physics of the system. For us, having access to those data and working with the OMG investigators can bring us a long way in studying these animals.”

Horrified by the attack, but also inspired to do something useful, Kiran Bhaganagar, professor of mechanical engineering at The University of Texas at San Antonio, and her team from Laboratory of Turbulence Sensing and Intelligence Systems, used computer models to replicate the dispersal of the chemical gas. Results were published in Natural Hazards in May 2017. The accuracy of her simulations showed the ability to capture real world conditions despite a scarcity of information.

“If there is a sudden a chemical attack, questions that are important are: ‘how far does it go’ and ‘what direction does it go,'” Bhaganagar said. “This is critical for evacuations.”

Bhaganagar’s research is supported by the U.S. Department of Army Edgewood Chemical and Biological Center (ECBC), who hope to adopt her models to assist in the case of an attack on American soil.

Chemicals, whether toxic agents like sarin gas or exhaust from vehicles, travel differently from other particulates in the atmosphere. Like wildfires, which can move incredibly fast, chemicals create their own micro-conditions, depending on the density of the material and how it mixes with the atmosphere. This phenomenon is known as buoyant turbulence and it leads to notable differences in how chemicals travel during the day or at night, and during different seasons.

“In the nighttime and early morning, even when you have calm winds, the gradients are very sharp, which means chemicals travel faster,” Bhaganagar explained.

Even ordinary turbulence is difficult to mathematically model and predict. It functions on a range of scales, each interacting with the others, and disperses energy as it moves to the smallest levels. Modeling buoyant turbulence is even harder. To predict the effects of turbulence on the dispersal of chemical particles, Bhaganagar’s team ran computer simulations on the Stampede2 supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), the largest system at any U.S. university.

“We go into the physics of it and try to understand what the vertices are and where the energy is,” Bhaganagar said. “We decompose the problem and each processor solves for a small portion. Then we put everything back together to visualize and analyze the results.”

Bhaganagar used TACC’s supercomputers through the University of Texas Research Cyberinfrastructure (UTRC) initiative, which, since 2007, has provided researchers at any of the University of Texas System’s 14 institutions access to TACC’s resources, expertise and training.

The background atmosphere and time of day play a big role in the dispersal. In the case of the Syria attacks, Bhaganagar first had to determine the wind speeds, temperature, and the kinds of chemicals involved. With that information in hand, her high resolution model was able to predict how far and in what direction chemical plumes travelled.

“In Syria, it was very bad because the timing caused it to be ideal conditions to spread very fast,” she said. “We ran the actual case of Syria on the TACC supercomputer, got all of the background information and added it to the models, and our models captured the boundaries of the plume and which cities it spread to. We saw it was very similar to what was reported in the news. That gave us confidence that our system works and that we could use it as an evacuation tool.”

The research is targeted to short-term predictions: understanding in what direction chemicals will propagate within a four-hour window and working with first responders to deploy personnel appropriately.

However, running the high-resolution model takes time. In the case of the Syria simulation, it required five full days of number crunching on Stampede2 to complete. During a real attack, such time wouldn’t be available. Consequently, Bhaganagar also developed a coarser model that uses a database of seasonal conditions as background information to speed up the calculations.

For this purpose, Bhaganagar’s team has introduced a novel mobile sensing protocol where they deploy low-cost mobile sensors consisting of aerial drones and ground-based sensors to gather the local wind data and use the courser model to predict the plume transport.

Using this method, the four-hour predictions can be computed in as little as 30 minutes. She is working to bring the time down even further, to 10 minutes. This would allow officials to rapidly issue accurate evacuation orders, or place personnel where they are needed to assist in protecting citizens.

“There are hardly any models that can predict to this level of accuracy,” Bhaganagar said. “The Army uses trucks with mobile sensors, which they send into a circle around the source. But it’s very expensive and they have to send soldiers, which is a danger to them.” In the future, the army hopes to combine computer simulations and live monitoring in the case of a chemical attack.

Bhaganagar will conduct tests in the coming months at the U.S. Army experimental facility in Maryland to determine how well drones can predict wind conditions accurately.

“The higher the accuracy of the data — the wind speed, wind direction, local temperature — the better the prediction,” she explained. “We use drones to give us additional data. If you can feed this data into the model, the accuracy for the four-hour window is much higher.”

Most recently, she and her graduate student, who is a Ph.D. candidate, Sudheer Bhimireddy, integrated their buoyant turbulence model with the high-resolution Advanced Research Weather Research and Forecast model to understand the role of atmospheric stability on the short-term transport of chemical plumes.The research appears in the September 2018 edition of Atmospheric Pollution Research

Developing Tools to Detect Pollution in Your Community

In related work funded by the National Science Foundation, Bhaganagar has adopted her chemical plume model to do pollution tracking. She hopes her code can help communities predict local pollution conditions.

According to Bhaganagar, low-cost wind and gas sensors purchased by a community could help produce daily forecasts so individuals can take the proper precautions when pollution levels are concentrated in an area. Recent efforts have tried to determine how many sensors are needed to allow accurate local predictions.

“Can we detect zones of pollution and take effective measures to avoid pollution?” Bhaganagar asked. “If we had our own small-scale models that we could use in our communities that would have a big impact on pollution.”

Though community pollution forecasts would ultimately run on consumer-grade computers, such predictions would not be possible without access to supercomputers to test the models and generate a database of background conditions.

“TACC resources are so valuable,” she said. “I wouldn’t have even attempted these research projects if I wasn’t able to access TACC supercomputers. They’re absolutely necessary for developing new turbulence models that can save lives in the future.”

It might take ushering in healthy pancreatic cells like a Trojan horse.

The Trojan horse, in this case, would be collagen, a protein that the body already makes for building muscles, bones, skin and blood vessels. A collagen formulation mixed with pancreatic cells, developed by Purdue University researchers in collaboration with the Indiana University School of Medicine, is the first minimally invasive therapy to successfully reverse Type 1 diabetes within 24 hours and maintain insulin independence for at least 90 days, a pre-clinical animal study shows.

For diabetic pets, the next step is a pilot clinical study in dogs with naturally occurring Type 1 diabetes, which will be conducted in collaboration with Purdue’s College of Veterinary Medicine.

“We plan to account for differences from mouse to human by helping dogs first. This way, the dogs can inform us on how well the treatment might work in humans,” said Clarissa Hernandez Stephens, first author on the work and a graduate researcher in Purdue’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering. Findings appear in early view for a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Physiology — Endocrinology and Metabolism.

“With giving my dog shots twice a day, I have to constantly be thinking about where I am and when I need to be home. It greatly affects my work and my personal life,” said Jan Goetz, owner of a diabetic dog named Lexi. “Not having to give these shots would mean freedom.”

Type 1 diabetes affects about one in every 100 companion animals in the U.S., including dogs and cats, and approximately 1.25 million American children and adults.

David Taylor, an Indiana resident, has struggled with Type 1 diabetes for almost 50 years.

“A Type 1 diabetes diagnosis was my 18th birthday present, and since that first insulin injection, managing diabetes has been my ‘other’ full time job,” Taylor said. “Treatment methods have improved enormously over 50 years, but they still permit no time off for the patient. Receiving an injection every few months would restore the near-normal life to me that I haven’t had as an adult — and I could retire from that full-time diabetes management job.”

Because diabetes in dogs happens similarly in humans, treatment has so far been largely the same: Both need their glucose to be monitored throughout the day and insulin to be administered after meals.

This also means that dogs and humans could potentially benefit from the same cure: A new set of pancreatic cells to replace the clusters of cells, called islets, that aren’t releasing insulin to monitor blood glucose levels.

Still, 20 years of research and clinical trials hasn’t produced an effective islet transplantation therapy because multiple donors are needed, the current method of delivering islets through the portal vein of the liver is too invasive and the human immune system tends to destroy a large percentage of transplanted islets.

Purdue researchers simply changed how the islets were packaged — first, within a solution containing collagen, and second, as an injection through the skin instead of all the way at the liver, saving patients from a nasty procedure.

“Traditionally, we transplant islets in the liver of the animal and never do it under the skin, in large part because the skin doesn’t have the blood flow that the liver has for transporting insulin released by islets. And there are a lot of immune cells in the skin, so chances of rejection are high,” said Raghu Mirmira, professor of pediatrics and medicine and director of the Diabetes Research Center at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

The team removed the need for transplanting in the liver by thoroughly mixing mouse islets, provided by Mirmira’s lab, with the collagen solution. Upon injection just under the skin, the solution solidifies, the body recognizes the collagen and supplies it with blood flow to exchange insulin and glucose.

“It’s minimally invasive; you don’t have to go to the operating room and have this infusion into the portal vein. It’s as easy as it comes, just like getting a shot,” said Sherry Voytik Harbin, Purdue professor of biomedical engineering and basic medical sciences.

The researchers tested the effects of the solution between mouse twins and non-twins to check for discrepancies. Initial studies showed if the mouse donor were a twin to the recipient, the diabetic mouse could go at least 90 days without needing another shot. If not twins, the mouse would have normal blood sugar levels for at least 40 days. Nearly all transplanted islets survived either scenario, removing the need for multiple donors to compensate for those killed off by the immune system.

As they transition to testing the formulation in naturally diabetic dogs, the researchers will explore the feasibility of transplanting pig islets or stem cells programmed to produce insulin, in hopes that either method will further increase donor availability.

The islet transplantation therapy might also have implications for better treating severe pancreatitis.

A YouTube video is available at https://youtu.be/vndD_U2gb5Q.