By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Columnist

Not long ago, if a scientist wanted information about a place, he or she would have to go there and spend some time.

These days, scientists often call Fritz Amtsberg and his associates at Oceantronics, a Honolulu firm with 10 employees. Amtsberg said the firm calls itself a systems integrator.

An example: When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory wanted to get information at the North Pole, it hired Oceantronics.

Over the past few years, the company has built buoys that measure the ice temperature, the pressure in the ice, air temperature, wind speed, solar radiation and so forth.

Two years ago, the agency wondered if it could get real-time photography from the North Pole.

Amtsberg said his firm found a high-quality Web camera, hooked it up to a modem that communicated with an Iridium satellite, and it was suddenly possible to check out the North Pole's weather visually, with a new photo every few hours.

In the summer, it's sunlit all day, so the photos come 24 hours a day. You can see some of the pole photographs at the Web site www.arctic.noaa.gov/gallery_np.html. They're not current, though. It's now dark at the pole, so there's no new photography.

Amtsberg said his firm doesn't build the individual data-collection units, but it puts together systems that work. For instance, it may buy solar photovoltaic panels from Inter Island Solar Supply in Honolulu, and a weather station from Campbell Scientific, cameras from a quality Web camera firm and satellite communications gear from specialists in that field.

It will find the batteries that work best in an environment where temperatures drop to dozens of degrees below freezing. And then it puts them together in a compact package.

The units are flown to the North Pole in advance of each summer season. Since the North Pole is ice-covered ocean, and the ice moves (and occasionally in the summer it melts), the units normally last only a season. Eventually, Amtsberg said, they drift with the ice away from the pole, and when their supporting ice floe melts, they sink.

Next summer, the firm hopes to install a camera that can be panned across the landscape, so each photo will show a slightly different scene.

"We're looking for polar bears," he said, half-jokingly. Seeing bears at the pole would be a great draw for school kids, and might have some scientific value as well, he said.

Jan TenBruggencate is The Advertiser's Kaua'i Bureau Chief and its science and environment writer. Reach him at at jant@honoluluadvertiser.com or (808) 245-3074.