Over the next two weeks, a handful of NASA scientists will be living very different lives from the rest of us: they will board a research plane in Greenland alongside laser instruments to help calibrate NASA’s space-based measurements of Arctic ice.
Over the next two weeks, a handful of NASA scientists will be living very different lives from the rest of us: they will board a research plane in Greenland alongside laser instruments to help calibrate NASA’s space-based measurements of Arctic ice.
The ice researchers and instrument scientists will board NASA’s Gulfstream V jet and fly out of Thule Air Base in northwestern Greenland to head even farther north. And if they’re lucky with the weather, they’ll do that up to seven times.
The airborne campaign will study the jumble of ice, snow and melt ponds in the Arctic Ocean during the warmer summer months to better understand melting sea ice.
“The changes in Arctic summer sea ice thickness in the summer are really important since this is the time when the thicker, multi-year ice is disappearing,” said Nathan Kurtz, ICESat-2 deputy project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We want to keep track of it, but historically it’s been really difficult to do across the whole of the Arctic.”
Read more at: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
