Cambridge Bay: sea ice and snow, and terrestrial snow

  

Day 10: From Cambridge Bay to Queen Maud Gulf, McClintock Channel and the MOACC site (CB). Today was a sea ice day. There is a significant shear zone in the sea ice just to the west of Royal Canadian Geographical Society Island which we wanted to observe, along with a SmartICE site near the Finlayson Islands and then back to the intensive monitoring area on land north of Cambridge Bay where the MOACC project (Multidisciplinary Observatory for Arctic Climate Change and Extreme Events Monitoring). The photo above is of the CHARS facility (5 buildings in a group at the lower half).

We arrived at the airport and were ready for a long science flight on the Polar 5.

 

Photo of the Icebird instrument stowed beneath the aircraft

 

The Polar 5's home in Cambriodge Bay

[with contributions from Jeff] Today’s survey flight was the first without Arttu which left Jeff to operate the UWBM radar by himself for the first time. Thankfully Arttu left very detailed instructions on all aspects of the setup, operation, data backups, and processing for the system, though it was a bit nerve racking without his watchful eye. The day got off with a start as Jeff forgot the system drives and had to run back to our accommodations to grab the case of 20 SSDs used to store data in flight (which we call the “UWBM football”) - but after that everything went smoothly with the system. One of Richard’s students - Wei - has used UWBM data from TVC in the past and it is very interesting to see how the system works first hand! Hopefully Jeff is taking good notes because he will have to train another operator before the UW duo depart from Resolute and the rest of the crew continues north.

 

 

View from the observation dome backwards during the flight

With the Icebird deployed, we flew along at 200' above the ice. It is always an exciting ride; you know all is good because Alan and Kyle make sure that there is minimal movement as we track along. In addition, the crew cannot move around inside the cabin and communication on the headsets is kept to a minimum - "steady as she goes" would be the naval equivalent.  At 200 km/hr, any perturbation in the flight attitude can be a bad thing since the bird is only 40 feet above the ice.

 

View across the ice with the "bird" deployed.

The flight took about 5 hours and the cabin was quite warm. Jeff, took advantage of some down time to inspect the inside of his eyelids. But he bounced back into action when required :)

 

 

Active eyelid inspection

 

As we transitioned across from Fandlayson Islands to the MOACC site, one of the Distant Early Warning line (DEW Line) installations was visible. At 67 years old, this system is an iconic cold war relic that is a 4800km long early warning radar network designed to identify unwanted bombers that might come from the former Former Soviet Union. The sites have a couple of radar domes and together they are impressive as a string of sites but individually I cannot help thinking that it must have been pretty uncomfortable living. And its legacyt, as the CBC article notes, is perhaps a little mixed.

 

DEW line facility at Cambridge Bay

 

After we completed the sea ice passes, it was over to the MOACC site for some snow surveys. Due to a foggy atmosphere, this was cut short - so we managed to obtain CryoSAR passes but the lidar and UWBM snow radar had to be aborted so we could actually return to the airport and land at Cambridge Bay airfield. As we came back into land, the view below of Cambridge bay emerged.

 

 An emergent Cambridge Bay

Overall, another successful flight day and while we missed a few passes because of weather, there is a treasure trove of unique data emerging from this campaign, already.

Tomorrow: a down day with no flights planned.