Kate Ramseer: I can’t find the right words to describe summer sea ice from the air — which is unfortunate, as I am writing this post about NASA’s ICESat-2 Summer Sea Ice Campaign.
It’s like miles and miles of shattered glass, these bits and pieces of ice broken and stacked back together. It’s a honeycomb pattern, yet it’s a mixture of geometric shapes, without the neat hexagons. A 10,000-piece puzzle of white glaciers, meltwater basins, and dark open seas? Let’s go with that.
We’re flying over the Arctic Ocean in NASA’s Gulfstream V, a repurposed corporate executive jet (the trademark of former owner Swoosh still graces the stairs). On board are two laser instruments that accurately measure the height of ice, ice, thaws and the open ocean below. Hundreds of miles above us, that morning the ICESat-2 satellite flew over the same path and measured the same snow. Scientists will compare sets of data to better use satellite measurements and better understand how and when sea ice melts during the warm summer months.
Sorting instrument measurements and satellite measurements is not easy. A few days ago, scientists gathered in a common room in our hotel at Thule Air Force Base in northwest Greenland to compare ICESat-2’s orbital paths with cloud weather forecasts. Clouds are the scourge of summer weather campaigns in the Arctic – large storm systems can cover almost the entire ocean, and weather forecasting models are unreliable at these high latitudes.
But on this first expedition of the expedition, the clouds traveled great distances, sending scientists, instrument operators, and Mink into the stunning ice under the windows.
That’s a good thing,” said Rachel Dilling, a marine glaciologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, as a short colored glass mosaic of sea ice (is that better?) appears under a sunny sky.
It’s amazing to see all the buoys go through, to see the cracks between the buoys and the ridges where the buoys collide with each other. The expedition is particularly interested in measuring melt ponds, where the ice covering sea ice in basins melts when the ice thins from the surface.
As we kneel in front of the port windows and look outside, the lasers are next to us, and you look down. On this plane, Goddard’s Land, Vegetation, and Snow Sensor (LVIS, nicknamed King) fires its own laser to measure the time it takes for light to travel from the plane to snow, lake or water and back; ICESat-2 does the same from orbit.
However, not everything is smooth. To calibrate the LVIS, the aircraft must perform a series of pitches and coils. in the air over the polar ocean. on board with me.
I am not a big fan of flying. For a decade or so, we could fly without imagining a fiery death every time we encountered a little bit of turbulence. (I know, “physics,” but still.) I put up with it because I love going places.
But now in a small plane, we deliberately do a series of pitches (fast, then fast down) and roll (one down, then the other wing). on purpose. three times. The first time was the worst, says Nathan Kurtz, ICESat-2 deputy project scientist and campaign leader. Some may have; not mine. The first time was fun, I’ll help you out, and there’s a video proof somewhere of me laughing nervously.
Method 2: “Is LVIS Insufficiently Calibrated?” It was the first thought on my mind, which is why I’m not a machine scientist.
The third time, I regretted the snacks I brought on the plane. I said to myself look at the horizon when the plane began to turn. Soon the horizon disappeared, then the plane rolled in the other direction, it was icy, and then rolled in the other direction….
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and imagined the amazing view that would be there once the plane stopped spinning, a mixture of ice and water.
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