Happy New Year 2024 (and sorry for the forum being offline some hours) /DM
The engineering check flight took place on the morning of Mar. 6. On this flight, P-3 pilots and crew put the aircraft through its paces to make sure things are in proper working order. Later in the day, the P-3 took off again for the first project check flight, and flew along beaches on the Atlantic coast to test the aircraft’s GPS gear and the Airborne Topographic Mapper instrument.The next afternoon the IceBridge team took off again for the second project check flight to test the various radar instruments aboard the P-3. To carry this out the team flew south from Wallops and turned out to sea around Virginia Beach, heading for open water. The relatively flat surface of the Atlantic Ocean acts almost as a mirror for the radars, providing a good test environment. Also, by flying far off the coast, the team can test radars without the risk of interfering with electronics on the ground.After completing these check flights, the team set out to pack their bags and rest before the flight to Greenland. Once leaving Wallops, the P-3 and the IceBridge team will spend the next 11 weeks in the Arctic, collecting valuable sea and land ice data before returning to the United States on May 23.
The Icebridge P3 is currently in flight north of Svalbard.http://airbornescience.nasa.gov/tracker/
Thank you Jim for these great photos, which glacier is that in the first shot?
We're going to Fairbanks today via the Sea Ice - Laxon Line route. The team will remain in Fairbanks for 1 week to reach our northern most sea ice science targets.
Reaching an elevation exceeeding 2,700 m (9,000 ft), the range is believed to be approximately 126 million years old.
The North Beaufort Loop - with Barrow option. 5-6 passes over a ground site off the coast of Barrow as well.
East Beaufort. The IceBridge team will also be coordinating an overflight of a scientific camp run by the European Space Agency's CryoVex project and the Office of Naval Research.
IceBridge will fly the mission Beaufort-Chukchi Diamond today. Light snow in Fairbanks this morning.
IceBridge will return to Thule collecting data along the South Basin route. Takeoff was at 01:00 am Fairbanks time. We will land in Thule at 3 pm in the afternoon. A good part of the flight will be in darkness at high altitude often with beautiful views of the Aurora Borealis.
Today's flight [March 18th] is a new mission plan. It is designed to sample sea ice in the eastern Beaufort Sea in an area which lacked IceBridge coverage prior to 2013, which is also of priority interest to the Canadian Space Agency. We also overfly the CryoVEx/ONR Marginal Ice Zone Camp #2 with 9 overflights and a pass over the groomed skiway. The leg near Banks Island (EBC-EBD) was to survey the very thin ice which typically forms in this region.
No flight today. Blowing snow resulting in low visibility on the runway at Thule Air Base prevents us from taking off today. We are currently in storm condition "bravo" and have to use the "buddy system" to travel between buildings on base.
The IceBridge data portal is here: http://nsidc.org/icebridge/portal/Large text files containing ice and snow thickness (and other data), with time date, and latitude/longitude of each sample are available here: http://nsidc.org/data/idcsi2
There has been an average loss of 300 cubic kilometres of ice per year between 2003 and 2012
Accurate data is the only way to know what's happening on Earth, and why.
Please explain. Is that a research station?
