Transcripts of OIB Arctic 2011 preview

[music] Operation IceBridge is heading back out into the Arctic. For the next 10 weeks we’ll be flying our NASA aircraft over the Arctic sea ice, over the Greenland Ice sheet, and over some of that ice sheet’s most interesting and dynamic outlet glaciers – Petermann, Helheim, Jacobshavn, and Kangerlussuak. We’ll also be taking a good look at the Canadian Ice Caps, which like their larger ice sheet counterparts are expected to make significant contributions to sea level rise. For the Arctic 2011 Campaign, IceBridge will be flying two different aircraft. Our PB aircraft will be flying the most sophisticated suite of instruments that has flown in the polar regions. The B-200 aircraft will be flying high at 28,000 feet. It will carry a single laser altimeter that has a large swath width to monitor large areas of elevation change in southern Greenland. Combined these instruments tell us important things about sea ice thickness as well as changes in the ice sheets and ice dynamics. As always this mission will continue the NASA elevation data sets over the polar regions. They started with ICESat, continue with IceBridge, and will finish with ICESat II creating a 17-year time series. This year we will also be tying in more to the CryoSat-2 satellite elevation measurements that are gathered by our European partners. We will be doing this by overflying ground validation sites on both the Greenland ice sheet as well as over Arctic sea ice. The Arctic 2011 IceBridge campaign is to be our most collaborative and largest yet.