[music]
Smith: Ok, our Photon Phriday
for this week is measurements over ice, but it’s not ice
that’s at the poles. It’s not from Greenland or from Antarctica.
It’s from western Washington, where I live. We’re going from
close to the Oregon border, where we hit Mount Adams, up to the
northwest, where we hit Mount Baker. And these are two of the
Cascade volcanoes. They’re not the two biggest volcanoes, but they each have
good sized glaciers on them. If you look closely at the profiles,
you can see that the signal gets bright as you go over the tops of
the glaciers. And that’s probably because there was still some snow left
over right up at the top. This is exciting because
the glaciers in Washington state are changing very quickly. We’ve had
a lot of fairly warm summers and winters
that have not been as snowy as we might expect. It’s been, to some extent, raining
instead of snowing. So the glaciers are shrinking quite quickly.
We’ve got a measurement early in the mission that hit both
of these mountains. We can hope to hit it again, maybe in a couple of
years, and we’ll have elevation change measurements for both glaciers. [music]