Operation IceBridge Ensures Optimal Data Transmission to Researchers
02.09.2010 - Ice & Snow, Bi-polar
Operation IceBridge, NASA’s airborne mission to observe changes in polar land and sea ice, will embark on a fourth field season in October. Over the course of 2009, 41 flights were carried out over a distance of roughly 230 000km. Working with the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder, NASA aims to bring data from the aircraft and instruments to researchers' computers as fast as possible.
During its survey of both poles, the project used laser altimeters to collect surface elevation information for ice sheets and sea ice previously observed by NASA's Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) in the Arctic. In the Antarctic, the project helped in a detailed survey of various glaciers and collected the first airborne data for sea ice in the Weddell and Bellingshausen Seas.
The data collected on the 2010 IceBridge Greenland campaign should be available in autumn 2010, allowing the NSIDC to publish data within six to eight weeks of receiving the data from the research teams. Thanks to the rapid turnaround, the data collected during IceBridge will further help bridging the gap in polar observations until ICESat-2 is launched in 2015.
