Stuck oil rigs, grizzly bears and changing weather patterns are just a few of the obstacles Gijs de Boer and his team of researchers encountered on the ground in Oliktok Point, Alaska. De Boer, a scientist with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), who works in NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, spent the last two weeks deploying the DataHawk 2, a small, lightweight, unmanned aircraft, designed by CU-Boulder’s Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences.