Operation IceBridge - Arctic Spring 2016

[Jim Hunt]

On their Facebook page the NASA Operation IceBridge team report that:

Preparations for the spring Arctic 2016 campaign have begun!

NASA and NOAA engineers are busy integrating instruments into a NOAA P-3 in advance of the Operation IceBridge Arctic campaign beginning in late March. The nose radome of the aircraft is in the up position for installation of OIB instruments.

[Jim Hunt]

If recent history is anything to go by the Operation IceBridge P3 ‘Miss Piggy’ should be heading north shortly. Currently the NASA live flight tracker shows her firmly grounded in Florida:

http://airbornescience.nasa.gov/tracker/#view=map&callsign=NOAA43

The latest news on Facebook is from March 4th:

DMS finished their install over last weekend, ATM and BESST are nearly complete and heading home today, and CReSIS is finishing up some final cabling and will soon be ready to depart as well.

[Jim Hunt]

The NASA live flight tracker reveals the IceBridge P3 is currently on a test flight over Florida.

According to the Operation IceBridge Facebook page yesterday:

[This is the] NOAA P-3 returning from its first test flight in preparation for the NASA OIB Spring Arctic deployment.

[Jim Hunt]

The NASA live flight tracker reveals the IceBridge P3 is currently en route to Greenland.

According to the IceBridge Facebook page a few hours ago:

NOAA 43 prepares for transit from Buffalo, NY to Thule AFB Greenland preparing for the start of Operation IceBridge Spring 2016 Arctic Campaign.

[Jim Hunt]

Today's Operation IceBridge flight plan, via @NASA_Wallops on Twitter:

[Steven]

IceBridge Begins Eighth Year of Arctic Flights
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/icebridge-begins-eighth-year-of-arctic-flights

Operation IceBridge, NASA’s airborne survey of polar ice, completed its first Greenland research flight of 2016 on April 19, kicking off its eighth spring Arctic campaign. This year’s science flights over Arctic sea and land ice will continue until May 21.

...

The first leg of the mission will be based out of Thule Air Base in northwest Greenland and out of Fairbanks, Alaska. Ten high-priority sea ice flights and three land flights are planned from these two sites. The sea ice flights will collect sufficient data to give scientists a good sense of how the sea ice thickness is distributed in the west Arctic basin, said Jackie Richter-Menge

...

The second part of the Arctic campaign will be based in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland and will focus on gauging surface elevation changes in land ice.

The start of this year's campaign seems to be later than in recent years.  In the last few years the Operation IceBridge spring campaign used to start in March, rather than April.

[Jim Hunt]

From the OIB Facebook page this morning:

Today IceBridge flew the Laxon Line mission en route to Fairbanks, crossing a large portion of the Arctic basin covering both seasonal first year and multi-year ice. Along the way they flew over this large lead in the ice pack near the Alaskan coast.

[Steven]

From the OIB Facebook page this morning:

Today IceBridge flew the Laxon Line mission en route to Fairbanks, crossing a large portion of the Arctic basin covering both seasonal first year and multi-year ice. Along the way they flew over this large lead in the ice pack near the Alaskan coast.

Here is the flight map for the "Laxon Line" (i.e. yesterday's flight):



Today's flight is the "SIZRS zigzag":



On the IceBridge website, they have a pdf-file with more information about the flights that are planned for the next several days/weeks:

http://icebridge.gsfc.nasa.gov/?page_id=1625

[Jim Hunt]

An interesting snippet from Facebook:

IceBridge is heading north from Fairbanks to fly the Sea Ice Sizrs Zig Zag mission today, and underflying the Sentinal-3a satellite.

It sounds as though using Sentinel 3 in a CryoSat role is on the cards?

[charles_oil]

OIB flew the SIZRS Zig Zag flight today, named in part for a collaboration with the Seasonal Ice Zone Reconnaissance program. During today's mission we conducted a coordinated line directly underneath the recently launched Sentinel-3 radar altimeter satellite, overflew several undersea sonar moorings, and flew a new racetrack pattern near Barrow to make measurements similar to the ICESat-2 beam pattern over landfast ice. Impressive views of the Brooks Range, large wind-roughened leads, and the town of Barrow were seen along the way.

A large flaw lead separating the fast ice and main pack ice (Photo credit: Aaron Wells)

https://www.facebook.com/NasaOperationIcebridge/ for more

[Jim Hunt]

I rather liked the aerial view of Barrow too:


(Photo credit: Jeremy Harbeck)

[Neven]

Thanks for keeping such a close eye on this, Jim. I can't wait to see the results and compare it to previous years.

[charles_oil]

Its Live steaming NOW 1255 cet if you have the bandwidth ! 

https://www.facebook.com/NasaOperationIcebridge/

[charles_oil]

They said they should have a good quality version uploaded soon - useful commentary during the takeoff.

[Steven]

Operation IceBridge "quick look" data for the spring 2016 Arctic campaign have been uploaded yesterday on the NSIDC website.  According to the data page:

This quick look product is experimental and is designed to be applicable for time-sensitive projects such as sea ice forecasting.

FWIW, I downloaded the data and wrote a small script to plot them: see the images below.  There are tens of thousands of data points for each flight, but for the plots I smoothed them on a coarser grid.

There were 6 sea ice flights during this campaign, between 19 April and 4 May 2016.

Snow depth:




Sea ice thickness:



(unfortunately there are some missing data here, e.g. north of Greenland and Ellesmere.)


For comparison, see the linked images below for the 2012 and 2015 plots.  Note that there were more flights during these years than in 2016, and they took place between mid March and early April (i.e. about 1 month earlier than in 2016):

2012 snow depth
2015 snow depth
2016 snow depth

2012 sea ice thickness
2015 sea ice thickness
2016 sea ice thickness

[Neven]

Cool stuff, Steven. Thanks.

[FishOutofWater]

Thanks, Steven. On first glance the thickness looks similar to the Ice Sat map. It will be interesting to see how the researchers analyze the details. It's clear that the thin ice off of Barrow in both this map and the ice sat map match what we're seeing on the MODIS images.

[Steven]

On first glance the thickness looks similar to the Ice Sat map.

Sea ice thickness for Operation IceBridge seems to be thicker in most cases than for CryoSat.  Perhaps pressure ridges are observed more accurately by OIB than by CryoSat?

There was an OIB flight over the western Beaufort Sea on 21 April 2016, with flight map shown here (called the "SIZRS zigzag").  FWIW I just plotted a histogram of the sea ice thickness quick look data for this flight: see the image below.  There are about twelve thousand valid sea ice thickness data points for this flight.  Their median value is 2.37 meters, but the distribution has a fat tail of higher thicknesses, which should correspond to ridged/deformed ice:



(For the cumulative distribution function of the above data, see here.)

[Tor Bejnar]

Could somebody take data from another ice thickness source or two and match dates and approximate path and do a histogram of that (or those) set(s) of data?

[ghoti]

IceBridge just posted to Facebook that they overflew a series of sonar moorings north of Barrow. https://www.facebook.com/NasaOperationIcebridge/

Anyone have an idea where the sonar data can be found? Would that data give us a peek at ice thickness? With the dearth of live IMB buoys out there a source of real ice thickness data would be wonderful.

Or is this the case that no data is available until someone goes out there and retrieves the moorings?