Operation IceBridge Flight Lines 2009-2019

  • Released Thursday, December 12th, 2019
  • Updated Friday, August 25th, 2023 at 12:12AM
  • ID: 4774

For ten years from 2009 to 2019, the planes of NASA’s Operation IceBridge flew above the Arctic and Antarctic, gathering data on the height, depth, thickness, flow and change of sea ice, glaciers, and ice sheets.

Designed to bridge the gap between NASA’s two Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellites, ICESat and ICESat-2, IceBridge made its final flight in November 2019, one year after ICESat-2’s successful launch. The fleet of aircraft carried more than a dozen instruments, from ice-penetrating radar and elevation-mapping lasers to optical and infrared cameras.

This visualization shows the flight lines of each yearly campaign from 2009 to 2019, created from navigational data obtained from the flights.



Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio


Datasets used in this visualization

Terra and Aqua BMNG (A.K.A. Blue Marble: Next Generation) (Collected with the MODIS sensor)

Credit: The Blue Marble data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC).

Dataset can be found at: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/

See more visualizations using this data set
IceBridge Navigational Data
Ephemeris

Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.