Wheels Up For NASA Mission's Most Extensive Arctic Ice Survey

Since 2009, Operation IceBridge has flown annual campaigns over the
Arctic starting in March and over Antarctica starting in October. The
mission extends the multi-year record of ice elevation measurements
made by NASA's Ice Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), which
stopped collecting data in 2009, and the upcoming ICESat-2, scheduled
for launch in 2016.

"Each successive IceBridge campaign has broadened in scope," said
IceBridge project scientist Michael Studinger of Goddard Earth
Sciences and Technology Center at the University of Maryland. "This
year, we have more flight hours and flight plans than ever before. We
are looking forward to a busy, fruitful campaign."

The first science flight is scheduled for this week, pending favorable
weather. For almost 10 weeks, researchers will operate an array of
airborne instruments collecting data over Arctic land and sea ice.

Among the highest priority flights is an overnight transit to
Fairbanks, Alaska, to collect sea ice thickness data across a slice
of the Arctic Ocean. Sea ice is thought to be thinning in recent
years in addition to shrinking in the area covered. Another
high-priority flight plan is to fly over the Barnes and Devon ice
caps of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.

"The Canadian ice caps are notably smaller than the Greenland and
Antarctic ice sheets, but are still significant potential
contributors to sea-level change in the next few decades," said
Charles Webb, deputy cryosphere program manager at NASA's Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "They also serve as potential
early-warning indicators, responding more sensitively to temperature
changes than the more massive ice sheets."

The IceBridge campaign also plans to fly for the first time over the
European Space Agency's ground-based calibration sites for their
ice-observing satellite, CryoSat-2. Flights over calibration sites
ultimately are expected to provide data to evaluate and improve
remote-sensing measurements.

Still other IceBridge missions will retrace paths flown in previous
years, such as flights over Petermann, Jacobshavn, Kangerlussuak and
Helheim glaciers. With this multi-year data, scientists can begin to
see how such glaciers -- the outlets through which Greenland loses
mass from its ice sheet -- are changing, where ice loss is slowing or
accelerating, and why.

The P-3B aircraft from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops
Island, Va., will fly from Thule and Kagerlussuaq, Greenland,
carrying a suite of instruments. The Airborne Topographic Mapper
measures changes in the surface elevation of the ice by reflecting
lasers from the ground back to the aircraft and converting the
readings into elevation maps.

Radar instruments onboard the P-3B from the University of Kansas'
Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets in Lawrence, Kan., allow
scientists to see snow and ice characteristics at the surface and
down to the bedrock. A gravity instrument from Columbia University's
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., is used to peer
below floating ice to determine the shape of water-filled cavities below.

Another laser altimeter, the Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor,
operates at higher altitudes to survey large areas. This altimeter
will fly solo out of Kangerlussuaq on the King Air B-200, an aircraft
based at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

The IceBridge campaign is led by Goddard. The Earth Science Project
Office at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., is
responsible for integration of science experiments on the aircraft
and mission logistics.

For more information about Operation IceBridge, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/icebridge/

Source: NASA

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