NASA Begins Airborne Campaign to Map Greenland Ice Sheet Summer Melt
For the first time, a NASA airborne campaign will measure changes in the height of the Greenland Ice Sheet and surrounding Arctic sea ice produced by a single season of summer melt.
NASA’s C-130 research aircraft flew from the Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va., to Greenland on Wednesday (Oct 30th) where they will conduct survey flights to collect data that will improve our understanding of seasonal melt and provide baseline measurements for future satellite missions. Flights are scheduled to continue through Nov. 16.
The land and sea ice data gathered during this campaign will give researchers a more comprehensive view of seasonal changes and provide context for measurements that will be gathered during NASA’s ICESat-2 mission, which is scheduled for launch in 2016.
“The more ground we cover the more comparison points we’ll have for ICESat-2,” said Bryan Blair of Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., principal investigator for the Land, Vegetation and Ice Sensor, or LVIS.
Warm summer temperatures lead to a decline in ice sheet elevation that often can be significant in low-lying areas along the Greenland coast. In past years, the Jakobshavn Glacier, located in the lower elevations of western Greenland, has experienced declines of nearly 100 feet in elevation over a single summer. Higher elevations farther inland see less dramatic changes, usually only a few inches, caused by pockets of air in the snowpack that shrink as temperatures warm.
“Surface melt is more than half of the story for Greenland’s mass loss,” said Ben Smith, senior physicist at the University of Washington’s Advanced Physics Laboratory, Seattle, and member of the science team that selected flight lines for this campaign. The rest of Greenland’s mass loss comes from ice flowing downhill into the ocean, often breaking off to form icebergs, and from melting at the base of the ice sheet.
Researchers will measure ice elevation using the LVIS laser altimeter and the LVIS-GH, a new, smaller version designed to fly on NASA’s Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle. LVIS and LVIS-GH will measure separate but overlapping swaths of the ice from an altitude of 28,000 feet.
The C-130 carrying both instruments will fly out of Thule and Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, allowing researchers to sample both high- and low-elevation ice and a variety of geographic areas.
“We plan to concentrate our flights on areas northwest, southeast and southwest Greenland and the Arctic Ocean,” said Michelle Hofton, LVIS mission scientist at Goddard and the University of Maryland, College Park. “The measurements we collect along lines sampled in IceBridge’s spring 2013 Arctic campaign will allow scientists to assess changes over the summer.”
Flying from Thule also will allow mission scientists to gather data on Arctic sea ice shortly after it reaches its annual minimum extent. This will help researchers get a clearer picture of what happens over the summer. It also will help researchers gather new data on snow covering sea ice when combined with information collected by the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 polar-monitoring satellite. LVIS detects the snow surface while CryoSat’s radar sees through snow to find the top of the ice. Researchers can combine these measurements to calculate snow depth.
“This will be crucial for assessing the snow cover on sea ice during a very different time of year,” said Nathan Kurtz, sea ice scientist at Goddard.
For more information about NASA’s IceSat-2 satellite, visit:
http://icesat.gsfc.nasa.gov/icesat2
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Rob Dawg says:
November 4, 2013 at 8:05 pm
Of all the places one can visit over one season out of the year only and get an erroneous picture this would rank high.
On the contrary, if you’re testing equipment which can differentiate between the ice and the snow overburden it makes sense to measure when fresh snow is accumulating.
rogerknights says:
November 4, 2013 at 8:32 pm
Maybe a drone could do some of this work?
Obviously NASA thinks so since they’re using the mission to test a Drone version of the hardware.
“Researchers will measure ice elevation using the LVIS laser altimeter and the LVIS-GH, a new, smaller version designed to fly on NASA’s Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle.”
Since this is the first time they have done it, it will certainly be “unprecedented melt”!!
Steve Oregon says:
November 4, 2013 at 8:05 pm
And to think NASA used to waste their time going to the Moon.
===============
Flying missions to planet earth, NASA replaced the rocket scientists with space cadets.
Hard to believe but there was a time when NASA actually flew manned missions as much as 100 miles into space. There are ancient legends that they even flew manned missions to the moon, but the people that knew how to do it are no more. There was even a movie about it, Chariot of the Gods wasn’t it?
Is the purpose here to establish a ground truth box for future satellite calibration?
I agree with many of the commenters here: why is NASA doing this? Have they transformed their agency’s mission to “Follow the money”? Sad.
Actual Study with graphs shown: A new approach for reconstructing glacier variability based on lake sediments recording input from more than one glacier
Oh, the humanity! Imagine the carbon footprint of this operation. And I’m sure trends based on a single year’s data are bound to be terrifying. In fact, I’m going to beat the rush and be scared right now.
But seriously, isn’t it a normal Greenland summer during which the previous winter snowfall becomes compressed and compacted, along with newer ice, to join with the ice sheet? I imagine that this probably accounts for lots of elevation loss every summer. In fact, 100 ft of elevation loss in a single summer probably argues for more deposition than loss, as this would represent a lot of winter snow.
I think the height of the Greenland ice sheet over time is a valuable and interesting project. But wouldn’t a satellite observation system in geosychronous orbit do this more easily, consistently and accurately? Isn’t that kind of thing what NASA used to stand for? Or has NASA completely lost it? Are they just another governmental arm of creeping collectivism, political correctness, Muslim outreach and redistribution of wealth?
Isn’t the US setting a dangerous precedent, flying scientific missions over other countries?
Imagine the reaction in the US if other nations started flying scientific missions over the US. Imagine the headlines. “Chinese to fly mapping mission over the US to study CO2 emissions”.
Strange they didn’t just mount the gear on one of the regularly scheduled US scientific missions to Antarctica, if the aim was ice/snow calibration. Antarctica is open to all nations for scientific research and the US maintains bases there. Why did NASA need to fly a special mission to Greenland of all places?
Hey NASA is on a mission.
Greenland: The final folly
These are the voyages of the polarship, Oblivous.
Its 5 year mission
To explore strange new melting
To seek out new melt and new ponding water
To blindly go nuts as no man has gone before
,
ferd berple says:
November 5, 2013 at 6:52 am
Why did NASA need to fly a special mission to Greenland of all places?
It’s becoming hard to hide the failure of the arctic ice cap to keep up with their silly ice out by 2013 predictions. By starting to measure new things without historical context, and measuring something that only they have data from, it’s much easier to create scare predictions which are harder to refute.
The Greenland ice sheet is the canary in the ice age mine. About 3 million years ago, when the Panama canal formed, joining the American continents, the Greenland ice sheet began to grow.
If and when it ever does melt entirely, that will announce the end of this current Ice Age in which we live, which has lasted approximately 2.6 million years. Even alarmist warmists acknowledge that it would take thousands of years for the Greenland ice sheet to melt away completely, and this would entail the world being subjected to global temperatures at least 5 to 10 degrees C above our current 14.3 degrees C over that period of thousands of years.
In other words, after thousands of years of experiencing such high global temperatures, the Greenland ice sheet would melt away. It ain’t gonna happen. But if it ever does, this would call for a huge world-wide celebration of the ending of this present Ice Age.
And to think, this would never be happening if it weren’t for keeping my house warm in the winter. Of course this ice sheet was not melting 100yrs ago…1000yrs ago. ppfffffftttttt!!!!!! dolts.
Interesting story here:
http://www.conservationwatcher.com/riddleofthelostsquadron.html
When the lost squadron was found it was not expected that 268 feet of ice would have to be removed to expose the planes.
Is it just possible they are launching this project at the ‘wrong’ time? Climate change does happen you know. 😉
Here are a selection of papers (abstracts) showing higher rates of warming and glacial retreat in the first half of the 20th century.
See also what happened in 1889.
“Summer Aerial Melt” Wasn’t that a new sandwich from Quizno’s?
Since we didn’t hear much about ICESat we can conclude that the satellite didn’t produce the ‘right’ results and ICESat-II is an attempt to repeat the previous mission hoping to get the ‘right’ answer.
Here is a link to the previous results for Greenland. Note the second paragraph; NASA has done the C-130 trip 4 times before – maybe they’ll get the ‘right’ result this time:
http://icesat.gsfc.nasa.gov/icesat/science_mission/earth_dynamic_ice_1.html
These are hard working people doing highly skilled work in very challenging conditions. Perhaps it is worth spending more time learning about what they are doing before speculating in blog comments to conclude it is a waste of time.
There is plenty of information in the public domain describing:
Satellite ice measurement data; many of the other previous and ongoing airborne ice measurement campaigns; the science these missions have produced and continue to produce; future plans for UAVs and satellite measurements; how ground, airborne, and satellite measurements are done and why they can compliment each other; how they can be used to independently calibrate and cross check different instruments; the reasoning behind why and when specific areas are targeted with different platforms; where this particular campaign fits into the broader picture…
Or any number of the things people are wondering about and commenting on above.