[wind noise]
[bird hoots] I'm Michael Studinger, I'm the Project Scientist for NASA's Operation IceBridge.
The IceBridge aircraft has a unique suite of instruments that we fly over the sea ice. And we don't have the kind of coverage that a satellite can provide but we have very detailed measurements of the thickness of the sea ice that no one else can do. And we know that the thicker sea ice is diminishing very quickly and that this is a reason for real concern.
This year we had a very ambitious sea ice part of Operation IceBridge and we had a very short window to accomplish many of these flights, so there was a bit of a pressure for us to get a lot of flights in in a very short window and so we heavily depend on really excellent weather for our missions, and so the weather has to cooperate with what we do and we got eight out of nine sea ice missions that we had planned. So we have flown over 60 hours of aircraft iime over the sea ice have collected over 30,000 kilometers of data in the Arctic Ocean with sea ice data.
One of the really important missions that we have flown was a flight where the Cryosat satellite from the European Space Agency was actually flying directly over us and simultaneously collecting data over the sea ice in the Artic Ocean. And it's not only linking airborne data from aircraft to the satellite data, we also provide the link to measurements on the ground. It's a bit of a tricky issue because the camp is moving very fast.
Sea ice moves about 200 meters per hour and we had to make sure that with the aircraft we fly directly overhead of their survey line. And so this is a unique data set that we have collected there where we measure ground truth measurements that people have done on the sea ice, can compare to our airborne measurements and then link it to satellite measurements, so that's something extremely important to have and logistically not easy to do.