Transcript

Narration:

Transcript:

[Michael Studinger] I'm Michael Stundinger and I'm the project scientist for Operation IceBridge. [music] In the particular upcoming campaign, we will focus on measuring ice surface elevations over Antarctica with a laser scanner we have mounted on the DC-8 aircraft. And we will also look into measuring the surface elevation and surface characteristics of the sea ice that surrounds Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. Since we have this opportunity with a big aircraft that can carry many different instruments that not only measure the ice surface but we have also ice-penetrating radar instruments on the aircraft that allow us to actually look through the ice and find out how thick the ice is over the interior of Antarctica. This is something we need to know in great detail in order to have better ice sheet models that will allow us to characterize how much sea level will rise in the next decades. About the time we started flying in Antarctica last year in October, ICESat stopped collecting data. The follow-up mission, ICESat-II, will launch in 2015. In order to fill this gap, NASA has launched Operation IceBridge. We're looking back through ten years of weather history to come up with a certain estimate of how many flights, depending on the availbility of crew and other things we can possibly accomplish in that time window. And if we accomplish 90% we will be really very satisfied.