NASA's IceBridge Mission in the Arctic Wraps Up for the Season with New Ice Data

NASA's Operation IceBridge has officially wrapped up for 2015. Now, scientists are hoping the data will aid them with further studies.

In this latest Arctic field season, IceBridge, which is NASA's twice-yearly airborne survey of polar ice, carried out 33 eight-hour flights during a period of 10 weeks. IceBridge collected data over sea and land ice regions that have been evolving rapidly over the last decade. The mission also has released sea ice data that will help scientists forecast how Arctic sea ice will behave during the summer.

"We achieved good coverage of our sea ice target areas, northern Greenland and Arctic Canada, and excellent coverage of land ice targets in southern Greenland," said John Sonntag, Operation IceBridge's Field Team Lead, in a news release.

Since 2012, IceBridge has been releasing a quick analysis of its sea ice thickness data. Last year, the IceBridge team started producing a second set of data that relates IceBridge's regional measurements with global data from the European Space Agency's satellite, CryoSat-2 in order to show ice thickness around the entire Arctic Ocean.

The ice thickness data sets help scientists monitor exactly how much the region is suffering from melt. This is particularly important when making future climate predictions.

The new deployment for IceBridge will be the Antarctic campaign, which will begin in October and which will be based in Punta Arenas, Chile. From there, the National Science Foundation's Gulfstream 5 research aircraft will fly over several targets in Antarctica, carrying IceBridge's Land Vegetation and Ice Sensor (LVIS) laser instrument.

Want to learn more about IceBridge? You can learn more about the mission on NASA's website.

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