Hola amigos: A VUELO DE UN QUINDE EL BLOG., hemos recibido información de la Agencia Espacial NASA en sus investigaciones del Ártico, que lleva a cabo con su nave: NASA's Operation IceBridge, cuyo avión NASA's C-130 aircraft: Ha desarrollado la Operación IceBridge de la NASA, un estudio aéreo de los hielos polares, completó con éxito su primer vuelo de investigación de Groenlandia 19 de marzo de 2015, lanzando así su séptima campaña del Ártico. Vuelos de ciencias de este año más de marino en el Ártico y el hielo terrestre continuarán hasta el 22 de mayo
NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne survey of polar ice, successfully
completed its first Greenland research flight of 2015 on March 19, thus
launching its seventh Arctic campaign. This year’s science flights over Arctic
sea and land ice will continue until May 22.
NASA's C-130 aircraft getting readied for
pressurization tests on March16, 2015 at Wallops Flight Facility, during
preparation for the Arctic 2015 Operation IceBridge field campaign. The
mission¹s usual research aircraft in the Arctic, a P-3, is currently getting new
wings.
Image Credit:
NASA/Jefferson Beck
The mission of Operation IceBridge is to collect data on changing polar land
and sea ice and maintain continuity of measurements between NASA's Ice, Cloud
and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) missions. The original ICESat mission
ended in 2009, and its successor, ICESat-2, is scheduled for launch in 2017.
Operation IceBridge, which began in in 2009, is currently funded until 2019. The
planned two-year overlap with ICESat-2 will help scientists validate the
satellite’s measurements.
The extensive data IceBridge has gathered over the Greenland ice sheet during
its six years of operations have provided an improved picture of the surface,
the bed and the internal structures of Greenland’s ice sheet and allowed
scientists to create more accurate models of glacier contribution to sea level
rise. As for sea ice, IceBridge’s measurements of the thickness of sea ice and
its snow cover have assisted in improving forecasts for summertime melt,
enhanced the understanding of variations in ice thickness distribution from year
to year, and updated the climatology of the snow depth over sea ice.
The first part of the Arctic campaign, based in the Thule Air Base in
northern Greenland and including a short deployment to Fairbanks, Alaska, will
focus on the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean north of Greenland and in the Beaufort
and Chukchi Seas north of Alaska.
“As far as the sea ice flight lines go in the Arctic this year, the
new thing is that we’re not changing things this year,” said Jackie
Richter-Menge, IceBridge science team co-lead and sea ice researcher with the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in
Hanover, N.H. “We’ve achieved a pattern of survey flights that is doing its job:
it provides good insight into what the thickness distribution of the Arctic
cover looks like in the Western Arctic, late in the winter season. This coverage
is good both for modelers that are looking to do a prediction of the seasonal
extent of the ice cover through the following summer and it also pays a nice
complement to the satellite coverage that we’re getting from ESA’s [European
Space Agency] CryoSat-2 satellite.”
This year, one of IceBridge’s radar instruments, the Multi-Channel Coherent
Radar Depth Sounder (MCoRDS), which is operated by the Center for Remote Sensing
of Ice Sheets at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas, will try for the
first time to take direct measurements of sea ice thickness. Thickness is a key
indicator of Arctic sea ice’s likelihood to survive the summer melt season, but
remote measurements of this characteristic are largely indirect.
“It would really be a wonderful thing to get direct measurements of sea ice
thickness because what we have now is an inferred measurement based on how much
sea ice is floating above open water”, Richter-Menge said. “Direct measurements
would increase the level of certainty in the data.”
NASA’s Operation IceBridge is back in the field,
with a twist. Instead of using the P-3 or DC-8 aircraft from previous campaigns,
they’ve outfitted a C-130 cargo plane for the trip. Science flights begin this
week as the mission studies Arctic sea ice, ice caps, glaciers, and the
Greenland Ice Sheet
Image Credit:
NASA/Goddard
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The second part of the Operation IceBridge’s 2015 Arctic campaign will be
based in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, and it will focus on surveying ice surface
elevation and thickness at several rapidly changing points of the Greenland ice
sheet. Afterward, the team will return to Thule for the last phase of the field
campaign.
This year, four areas have been added to the list of Operation IceBridge’s
high priority missions. Among these are the Zachariae Isstrom glacier in
northeast Greenland and its neighbor to the north, the 79 N or
Nioghalvfjerdsbrae glacier. Both of these rivers of ice have rapidly increased
the rates in which they drain land ice to the ocean in the past years.
“That part of Greenland is changing very rapidly and corresponds to a basin
below sea level pretty far inland,” said Eric Rignot, IceBridge science team
co-lead and glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine and NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “It’s a sector that we’re
paying close attention to because it has the potential to change rapidly and it
could have a significant implication for sea level rise in the coming
decades.”
“As we do every year, we are sampling the four corners of Greenland and the
interior regions to complete a rather extensive survey of the ice sheet,” Rignot
said. “Recent results have shown that this type of survey is good enough to keep
track of the total mass loss of the ice sheet from year to year, and also to get
details on glaciers that are key players in driving the mass loss to higher
values every year.”
Operation IceBridge is using a different research aircraft this year, an
adapted C-130 Hercules former military plane. The mission’s usual ride in the
Arctic, a P-3, is getting new wings. Despite both planes having similar sizes
and capabilities, mounting IceBridge’s array of lasers and radars on an
unfamiliar fuselage doesn’t come without challenges.
“Any time we install our very extensive suite of sensors, they have to be
integrated in the aircraft, which means mechanically mounted in good, stiff
mounts, and the radar antennas have to be embedded within the fuselage so that
they function adequately without requiring time-consuming aerodynamic
modifications to the aircraft,” said John Sonntag, Operation IceBridge’s Field
Team Lead. “It takes a lot of time and mechanical work to get the sensors
mounted on the aircraft and to get the electrical interfaces with the crew and
the cockpit”.
As in previous years, Operation IceBridge will be collaborating with several
international research initiatives. In Barrow, Alaska, the C-130 will overfly a
sea ice experiment by the Naval Research Laboratory. In a remote outpost in the
northeastern Greenland coast, IceBridge will take measurements overlapping those
taken from the ground by researchers from the University of Manitoba, Canada.
And, weather permitting, NASA’s airborne polar laboratory will fly over a
drifting sea ice station in the Fram Strait, a passage between Greenland and
Svalbard that is the primary region of sea ice export from the Arctic.
“The purpose of our cooperations with other research groups is to
understand our own instruments better by comparison to the measurements they’re
collecting on the ground, primarily snow depth and sea ice thickness,” Sonntag
said. “ We use their detailed measurements collected on the ground to better
understand the geographically much wider, but in some cases less detailed
measurements we take from the air.”
The IceBridge project science office is based at Goddard. The C-130 research
aircraft is based at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. For more about
Operation IceBridge and to follow this year's campaign, visit:
NASA
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
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