9/15
We've been on pins and needles the last 2 weeks trying to organize and ICESat traverse with a NASA flight. Basically NASA uses satellites and other fancy equipment to determine the icesheet height and snow accumulation here and all across the Arctic and probably Antarctic. But they need ground-truthing to make sure what they have is accurate. Thus, we go out once a month and measure snow on snow accumulation markers and also drag along a sled with a GPS that is accurate to millimeters. We then give that data to NASA so that they can make sure all is well. Occasionally NASA does special flight missions, and it's extremely helpful to them if we due our traverse within the same day. NASA has been in Greenland for the past week, so everyday we have had to be ready to go on the traverse. It kind of becomes stressful b/c it a big (and potentially cold) day when we do a traverse. The traverse takes about 4 hours on snowmobile, but there's quite a lot of prepping beforehand. Everyday we kept getting an email "weather's bad, we'll try tomorrow" Or "weather looks promising tomorrow" but we just never went. Then on the very last possible day of their mission, before they had to head back, we got an email that it was a no go b/c of weather. But then an hour later we got an email that the weather might just break. So we rushed out to do the traverse and kept our fingers crossed that they could fly. We actually had a beautiful day for the traverse with low winds and a beautiful sky. But still some clouds in the area. Luckily, the clouds were JUST far enough off that they were able to do it. So it was all a success!!
We were very late to dinner b/c of the traverse and also one of the IceCaps lasers had gone out of alignment so we needed to skype with CU to fix it before dinner. Storm had made a heavy carb dinner and kept it warm for us. He made grilled cheese, some potatoe goulash stew, home-made giant soft pretzels, tater-tots, and german choclate cake.
You can read more about NASA's mission here, way better than I can explain it
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/greenland-campaign-takes-flight-for-better-ice-sheet-measurements
Also, interestingly, some of NASA's stuff was featured on cnn.com this morning
http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/16/weather/arctic-sea-ice-shrinking/
Also the NASA ICESat people just had a paper published today in which they give a shout out to the techs (us!) in the acknowledgements section of the paper. http://www.the-cryosphere-discuss.net/tc-2016-214/ You can read the paper at this link. Just open up the pdf of it to get to the acknowledgements which are at the end of the paper, but before the works cited.
Acknowledgements
We thank the NASA ICESat-2 Project Science Office for funding this data analysis and for MABEL data collection, processing, and distribution. Further, we thank the NASA Armstrong Air Operations Facility for MABEL data collection (specifically pilots T. Williams and D. S. Broce). We thank Operation IceBridge for the data collection and processing associated with the ATM and LVIS airborne components of this project. We thank the National Science Foundation and the
30 Summit Station Science Coordination Office (SCO) (NSF PLR 1042358) for support for the ground-based field componentof this project. Further, this project would not have been possible without the work of many Summit Station Science Technicians, who collected the in-situ GPS data. We thank K. Krabill (NASA GSFC WFF), C. Brooks, and D. Rabine (NASA GSFC) for GPS support. And we thank the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) for IceBridge data
distribution.
Here's some pretty interesting banter by the NASA folks about the flight and traverse. The last few are my favorite. Maybe some whiskey involved in their celebration of completing it! Very poetic at the end!
Hi Summit folk,
As I mentioned a week or so ago, we OIBrs are now operating survey flights out of Kanger. It appears that tomorrow, especially tomorrow afternoon, may provide a weather opportunity for us to overfly you guys. If so, I will explicitly let you know tomorrow, and in that case, I would request a survey of the 412 site at your earliest convenience.
So for now, please just consider this a possibility. And as always, massive thanks for your willingness to help!
John
John Sonntag
Mission Scientist
NASA Operation IceBridge
571-212-0972 (mobile)
Hi Summit techs,
NASA will not be flying to Summit today. Your weather appears to be pretty good (which you know far better than I!), but there is a large fog bank between you and us that would knock out a fair part of our science mission. So, we'll wait for a better day.
Thanks and more later,
John
John Sonntag
Mission Scientist
NASA Operation IceBridge
571-212-0972 (mobile)
Morning! I had hoped we could get our Summit flight in today, but satellite images show low clouds all over the place, including some quite near you guys at Summit. So, unfortunately we have to cancel today. I know that today was a good day for you to help us out with this and I wish we could have taken advantage of it. Will keep you posted. Right now Monday's forecast isn't promising either, but that could change.
Thanks Travis. We're grounded tomorrow (Sunday) for crew rest, so Monday is our next opportunity.
We're thinking you will see some clouds start to roll through later today.
Enjoy the weekend!
Hey guys, not yet. We flew a mission west of you this morning, but central Greenland has been pretty bad (weather-wise) for our needs. Tomorrow is not promising either, I am sorry to say.
OIB will take a "hard-down" day today, a decision we made late yesterday afternoon based on poor weather forecasts for today. These forecasts were correct, as the attached IR weather satellite image from 0355 local time this morning confirms.
This hard down day will reset our crew rest clocks, and help us to take full advantage of what we expect to be a window of improved weather conditions beginning tomorrow and, we hope, continuing through the weekend. We anticipate opening the airport this Sunday and flying as much as possible over the next 5-7 days.
Thanks you guys. Sorry to string you along on this deal. We'll get it done as soon as possible. Incidentally our last possible science flight is one week from today, the 15th.
Hey Travis and Elissa, we're back to flying today. We won't by flying over you guys this morning. There is a slight possibility we might do it this afternoon, but weather is again looking iffy for that. Will keep you posted.
Once again, we won't be flying to you guys today. Maybe tomorrow!
Hey guys, we're done flying for today, still with no Summit pass. We plan to fly tomorrow and Monday. A Summit flight is possible for Sunday and more probably for Monday. Will keep you posted.
I see you guys have partly cloudy skies this morning, and some sun. We're not flying over you this morning, but this afternoon is a possibility, and tomorrow is probably still a better possibility.
SInce you guys still have some clouds above you, we'll hold off today and try again tomorrow. Forecast looks pretty good for tomorrow, esp in the afternoon.
That's good news about your Tuesday schedule - we're still not happy with the weather today (we'll be flying along the west coast instead), but tomorrow looks pretty good.
Hey guys, once again I see pretty clear skies on your webcam, but the satellite image shows a lot of low clouds pretty much all around you. We'll try again this afternoon.
Our last go-no go decision of the campaign is also our toughest. Widespread fog currently exists across the Greenland summit ridge and for some distance to the west, with mostly clear skies on the east side of the ice cap. Summit Camp itself is currently fogged. The synoptic weather situation is static - there is no reason to expect much change in the situation during the day today due to movement of nearby weather systems. However, fog over the ice cap often (though not always) dissipates significantly as a result of daytime heating.
Thus, we've decided to launch the "Falcon - East Glaciers" mission today as our last mission of the campaign, but with a 2-hour delay in takeoff to 10 am local time (1200z) in order to give the fog a chance to dissipate with solar heating. We expect to obtain only between 30% and 50% coverage along the data lines, but we expect to obtain the best coverage in the east, where we have never obtained seasonal dh/dt measurements before - thus those measurements are disproportionately valuable. Our chance at successful data acquisition over the Summit IceSat 412 cal/val site is, quite frankly, a crap shoot given the unpredictability of the fog, but the primary reason for our two hour delay is to improve our chances there. Overall we believe this is worth the expense of the flight.
The two hour delay WILL NOT impact our plan of getting the Falcon out of here first thing tomorrow morning and on its way to Palmdale.
This mission is a shortened version of the East Glaciers 01 mission last flown in Spring 2015. In order to accommodate the shorter range of the Falcon jet, we eliminated six glacier centerlines in the far eastern portion of the flight. We also added an overflight of the IceSat 0412 cal/val site near Summit Camp.
Fortune favored the bold today, but she kept us on the edge of our seats up until the very last moment. This morning's satellite imagery showed an absence of strong organized weather systems around central Greenland, but it also showed widespread ground fog across the central ice divide, stretching west about halfway to that coast, with scattered to broken ground fog east of the divide. Summit Station's live webcam also showed dense fog there this morning. This morning was our last flight opportunity of the campaign, and this mission was the last remaining high-priority flight in our quiver. Reasoning that progressive solar heating as the sun rose higher would probably dissipate some of the fog, we delayed our takeoff by two hours to allow for more heating to occur, and launched this flight at 1000 local time. We found that the laws of thermodynamics indeed held true, and that much of the fog either dissipated or rose to form patches of thin stratus on and east of the divide. From the divide to the west, the stratus layer remained solid. At Summit Station itself, a patch of stratus held off a (very) few miles south of the station, just far enough for us to obtain excellent lidar elevation data on the IceSat 412 cal/val line. The lidar returns ended due to the clouds less than 15 seconds after we completed the 412 line. All in all, we succesfully acquired data across approximately 50% of the mission, with solid data along the most interesting eastern and Summit portions.
All instruments performed well.
We conducted a ramp pass at 16,000'.
We've been on pins and needles the last 2 weeks trying to organize and ICESat traverse with a NASA flight. Basically NASA uses satellites and other fancy equipment to determine the icesheet height and snow accumulation here and all across the Arctic and probably Antarctic. But they need ground-truthing to make sure what they have is accurate. Thus, we go out once a month and measure snow on snow accumulation markers and also drag along a sled with a GPS that is accurate to millimeters. We then give that data to NASA so that they can make sure all is well. Occasionally NASA does special flight missions, and it's extremely helpful to them if we due our traverse within the same day. NASA has been in Greenland for the past week, so everyday we have had to be ready to go on the traverse. It kind of becomes stressful b/c it a big (and potentially cold) day when we do a traverse. The traverse takes about 4 hours on snowmobile, but there's quite a lot of prepping beforehand. Everyday we kept getting an email "weather's bad, we'll try tomorrow" Or "weather looks promising tomorrow" but we just never went. Then on the very last possible day of their mission, before they had to head back, we got an email that it was a no go b/c of weather. But then an hour later we got an email that the weather might just break. So we rushed out to do the traverse and kept our fingers crossed that they could fly. We actually had a beautiful day for the traverse with low winds and a beautiful sky. But still some clouds in the area. Luckily, the clouds were JUST far enough off that they were able to do it. So it was all a success!!
We were very late to dinner b/c of the traverse and also one of the IceCaps lasers had gone out of alignment so we needed to skype with CU to fix it before dinner. Storm had made a heavy carb dinner and kept it warm for us. He made grilled cheese, some potatoe goulash stew, home-made giant soft pretzels, tater-tots, and german choclate cake.
You can read more about NASA's mission here, way better than I can explain it
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/greenland-campaign-takes-flight-for-better-ice-sheet-measurements
Also, interestingly, some of NASA's stuff was featured on cnn.com this morning
http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/16/weather/arctic-sea-ice-shrinking/
Also the NASA ICESat people just had a paper published today in which they give a shout out to the techs (us!) in the acknowledgements section of the paper. http://www.the-cryosphere-discuss.net/tc-2016-214/ You can read the paper at this link. Just open up the pdf of it to get to the acknowledgements which are at the end of the paper, but before the works cited.
Acknowledgements
We thank the NASA ICESat-2 Project Science Office for funding this data analysis and for MABEL data collection, processing, and distribution. Further, we thank the NASA Armstrong Air Operations Facility for MABEL data collection (specifically pilots T. Williams and D. S. Broce). We thank Operation IceBridge for the data collection and processing associated with the ATM and LVIS airborne components of this project. We thank the National Science Foundation and the
30 Summit Station Science Coordination Office (SCO) (NSF PLR 1042358) for support for the ground-based field componentof this project. Further, this project would not have been possible without the work of many Summit Station Science Technicians, who collected the in-situ GPS data. We thank K. Krabill (NASA GSFC WFF), C. Brooks, and D. Rabine (NASA GSFC) for GPS support. And we thank the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) for IceBridge data
distribution.
Here's some pretty interesting banter by the NASA folks about the flight and traverse. The last few are my favorite. Maybe some whiskey involved in their celebration of completing it! Very poetic at the end!
Hi Summit folk,
As I mentioned a week or so ago, we OIBrs are now operating survey flights out of Kanger. It appears that tomorrow, especially tomorrow afternoon, may provide a weather opportunity for us to overfly you guys. If so, I will explicitly let you know tomorrow, and in that case, I would request a survey of the 412 site at your earliest convenience.
So for now, please just consider this a possibility. And as always, massive thanks for your willingness to help!
John
John Sonntag
Mission Scientist
NASA Operation IceBridge
571-212-0972 (mobile)
Hi Summit techs,
NASA will not be flying to Summit today. Your weather appears to be pretty good (which you know far better than I!), but there is a large fog bank between you and us that would knock out a fair part of our science mission. So, we'll wait for a better day.
Thanks and more later,
John
John Sonntag
Mission Scientist
NASA Operation IceBridge
571-212-0972 (mobile)
Morning! I had hoped we could get our Summit flight in today, but satellite images show low clouds all over the place, including some quite near you guys at Summit. So, unfortunately we have to cancel today. I know that today was a good day for you to help us out with this and I wish we could have taken advantage of it. Will keep you posted. Right now Monday's forecast isn't promising either, but that could change.
Thanks Travis. We're grounded tomorrow (Sunday) for crew rest, so Monday is our next opportunity.
We're thinking you will see some clouds start to roll through later today.
Enjoy the weekend!
Hey guys, not yet. We flew a mission west of you this morning, but central Greenland has been pretty bad (weather-wise) for our needs. Tomorrow is not promising either, I am sorry to say.
OIB will take a "hard-down" day today, a decision we made late yesterday afternoon based on poor weather forecasts for today. These forecasts were correct, as the attached IR weather satellite image from 0355 local time this morning confirms.
This hard down day will reset our crew rest clocks, and help us to take full advantage of what we expect to be a window of improved weather conditions beginning tomorrow and, we hope, continuing through the weekend. We anticipate opening the airport this Sunday and flying as much as possible over the next 5-7 days.
Thanks you guys. Sorry to string you along on this deal. We'll get it done as soon as possible. Incidentally our last possible science flight is one week from today, the 15th.
Hey Travis and Elissa, we're back to flying today. We won't by flying over you guys this morning. There is a slight possibility we might do it this afternoon, but weather is again looking iffy for that. Will keep you posted.
Once again, we won't be flying to you guys today. Maybe tomorrow!
Hey guys, we're done flying for today, still with no Summit pass. We plan to fly tomorrow and Monday. A Summit flight is possible for Sunday and more probably for Monday. Will keep you posted.
I see you guys have partly cloudy skies this morning, and some sun. We're not flying over you this morning, but this afternoon is a possibility, and tomorrow is probably still a better possibility.
SInce you guys still have some clouds above you, we'll hold off today and try again tomorrow. Forecast looks pretty good for tomorrow, esp in the afternoon.
That's good news about your Tuesday schedule - we're still not happy with the weather today (we'll be flying along the west coast instead), but tomorrow looks pretty good.
Hey guys, once again I see pretty clear skies on your webcam, but the satellite image shows a lot of low clouds pretty much all around you. We'll try again this afternoon.
Argh. We still don't have the weather to come visit you guys (from
overhead of course) today.
We have to take tomorrow off, but we have one more chance Thursday morning. I must admit that the weather models aren't too promising for then either, but will keep my fingers crossed.
We have to take tomorrow off, but we have one more chance Thursday morning. I must admit that the weather models aren't too promising for then either, but will keep my fingers crossed.
Our last go-no go decision of the campaign is also our toughest. Widespread fog currently exists across the Greenland summit ridge and for some distance to the west, with mostly clear skies on the east side of the ice cap. Summit Camp itself is currently fogged. The synoptic weather situation is static - there is no reason to expect much change in the situation during the day today due to movement of nearby weather systems. However, fog over the ice cap often (though not always) dissipates significantly as a result of daytime heating.
Thus, we've decided to launch the "Falcon - East Glaciers" mission today as our last mission of the campaign, but with a 2-hour delay in takeoff to 10 am local time (1200z) in order to give the fog a chance to dissipate with solar heating. We expect to obtain only between 30% and 50% coverage along the data lines, but we expect to obtain the best coverage in the east, where we have never obtained seasonal dh/dt measurements before - thus those measurements are disproportionately valuable. Our chance at successful data acquisition over the Summit IceSat 412 cal/val site is, quite frankly, a crap shoot given the unpredictability of the fog, but the primary reason for our two hour delay is to improve our chances there. Overall we believe this is worth the expense of the flight.
The two hour delay WILL NOT impact our plan of getting the Falcon out of here first thing tomorrow morning and on its way to Palmdale.
Hey guys, we're coming! You saw my earlier message, but since I started
to compose it I see that your webcam looks a bit better than it did
earlier. Fingers crossed for clearing skies!
We expect to be overhead of you guys around 1400z, but even if the skies are clear you probably won't see us since we'll be 16,000' above you.
Good luck today - and thanks as always for your good-natured cooperation!
We expect to be overhead of you guys around 1400z, but even if the skies are clear you probably won't see us since we'll be 16,000' above you.
Good luck today - and thanks as always for your good-natured cooperation!
Mission: Falcon East Glaciers 01 (priority: high)
This mission is a shortened version of the East Glaciers 01 mission last flown in Spring 2015. In order to accommodate the shorter range of the Falcon jet, we eliminated six glacier centerlines in the far eastern portion of the flight. We also added an overflight of the IceSat 0412 cal/val site near Summit Camp.
Fortune favored the bold today, but she kept us on the edge of our seats up until the very last moment. This morning's satellite imagery showed an absence of strong organized weather systems around central Greenland, but it also showed widespread ground fog across the central ice divide, stretching west about halfway to that coast, with scattered to broken ground fog east of the divide. Summit Station's live webcam also showed dense fog there this morning. This morning was our last flight opportunity of the campaign, and this mission was the last remaining high-priority flight in our quiver. Reasoning that progressive solar heating as the sun rose higher would probably dissipate some of the fog, we delayed our takeoff by two hours to allow for more heating to occur, and launched this flight at 1000 local time. We found that the laws of thermodynamics indeed held true, and that much of the fog either dissipated or rose to form patches of thin stratus on and east of the divide. From the divide to the west, the stratus layer remained solid. At Summit Station itself, a patch of stratus held off a (very) few miles south of the station, just far enough for us to obtain excellent lidar elevation data on the IceSat 412 cal/val line. The lidar returns ended due to the clouds less than 15 seconds after we completed the 412 line. All in all, we succesfully acquired data across approximately 50% of the mission, with solid data along the most interesting eastern and Summit portions.
All instruments performed well.
We conducted a ramp pass at 16,000'.
Travis and Elissa,
You guys rock! Thanks so much for all your perseverance with our many weather delays, and for arranging for that cloud to stay 1 km south of the 412 line. Look me up if you come through the DC area, would love to buy you both some adult beverages sometime.
Cheers,
John
You guys rock! Thanks so much for all your perseverance with our many weather delays, and for arranging for that cloud to stay 1 km south of the 412 line. Look me up if you come through the DC area, would love to buy you both some adult beverages sometime.
Cheers,
John
9/16
Elissa made pizza. Two types: lobster pizza and walnut cheese pizza
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| a picture of glaciers NASA sent us |
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| the NASA flight path the day we did our traverse. The point in the upper left is where we are |
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| The NASA plane with a Russian plane in Kanger |
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| Picture of Summit with our cloud bank that NASA sent us |
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| traverse tracks |
