NASA MABEL Instrument to Investigate Summer Arctic Ice for Upcoming Satellite Launch

As summer continues, sea ice continues to melt. Now, NASA plans to sends its Multiple Altimeter Beam Experimental Lidar (MABEL) above Alaska and the Arctic Ocean on one of theER-2 high-altitude aircraft in order to investigate the features of the ice during the summer.

During the summer, the Arctic ice changes dramatically. This means that icy areas look different from a satellite's perspective, as well. When NASA launches the Ice, Cloud and Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) in 2017, the satellite will measure Earth's elevation by sending out pulses of green laser light and timing how long it takes to bounce off of Earth's surface and return. Patterns will differ depending on the type of terrain, which means that researchers need a preview when it comes to what the ice might look like.

That's why they're using MABEL. This instrument collects data in the same way that ICESat-2's instrument will. This means that collecting data with MABEL will allow researchers to create computer programs to analyze information from ICESat-2.

"We need to give scientists data to enable them to develop algorithms that work during summer," said Thorsten Markus, ICESat-2's project scientist, in a news release. "All the algorithms need to be tested and in place by the time of launch. And one thing that was missing was ICESat-2-like data on the summer conditions."

The researchers are especially interested in melt ponds and their impact on the extent of summer ice melt. Since dark water absorbs much more heat from the sun than ice or snow, the water could change the heat balance.

"The melt pond coverage may be an indicator of the ice coverage at the end of the summer," said Ron Kwok, a senior researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "But we don't have a lot of information about melt pond coverage over the Arctic."

After the MABEL flights, the scientists should be able to determine what melt ponds and melting snow will look like from ICESat-2. This will make data collected from the satellite far more useful to scientists, which could help them track the extent of melting ice in the future.