14 DAY TRIAL // Officials with the American space agency announce that Operation IceBridge has again moved to the Arctic, in a bid to map the extent of sea- and ground-based ices at and around the North Pole. Observations are being conducted from aboard a NASA P-3 research aircraft, which flew from the United States to Greenland on Monday, March 10.
IceBridge is a science campaign whose main purpose is to bridge two large datasets, one collected by the NASA EOS Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), and another that will start being assembled by ICESat-2, when the satellite launches, in 2017. Until then, the NASA P-3 aircraft will be ensuring data continuity over the Arctic.
For the new observations campaign, which will run until May 23, the P-3 took off from the NASA Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia, on Monday. The aircraft arrived safely in Greenland, and engineers immediately began preparing it for its science flights. This is the fifth consecutive year this campaign is being conducted based on the North Atlantic island.
Flights are usually conducted from Thule Air Base and Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, as well as from Fairbanks, Alaska. The sensitive instruments aboard the aircraft are able to provide experts with sufficient data to monitor rapidly-changing land and sea ice conditions at the North Pole. With the launch of ICESat-2 drawing closer, the mission is becoming increasingly important.
During its flights over both the Arctic and Antarctica, the aircraft was able to map the bedrocks under Greenland and Antarctica to an unprecedented degree of precision. In addition, variations in sea ice thickness and volume were also recorded for both areas. More recently, Operation IceBridge was able to determine the rate at which glaciers on the Greenland Ice Sheet flow into the Atlantic Ocean.
For this year's Arctic campaign, the P-3 research aircraft was also outfitted with a spectrometer instrument capable of measuring ice albedo, or reflectivity. This is important because recent studies have identified a decrease in albedo over the North Pole, which means that more heat is absorbed by the Arctic Ocean, and more multi-year ice melts every warm season.
“A small change in albedo over the entire Arctic could have a significant effect on how much heat is absorbed by the surface,” explains NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) sea ice expert Nathan Kurtz. He adds that the 2014 IceBridge campaign will serve to test the new airborne instrument.
Scientists will also be observing how Greenland's ice sheet is changing via the Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM) instrument. The goal here is to create a dataset that ICESat-2 will then be able to use as a benchmark for further investigations.