Trail Valley Creek Survey Day

 

Day 3: First Inuvik Flight Day

When we undertake field work on the ground, generally we arrive at our field site and we know that the planned day 1 of field work will indeed be the planned day 1, unless there is a rare extreme weather event that dictates otherwise. In flying airborne surveys, this may or may not be the case as the weather has a big part to play. On Wednesday evening, the weather gods seemed to be indicating that Thursday and Friday would be good fly days. And so Thursday morning we decided to fly the Trail Valley Creek watershed with the two radars, the lidar and the geodetic camera. Game on!!

 

 
Trail Valley Creek watershed

 

The first task on a day is to decide where to fly. The flight plan has to be given to the pilot and co-pilot who enter it into their navigation system. I have always thought that the these things are generally seamless.  But it turns out that even though we speak the same geographical language (latitude, longitude, UTM easting and northing etc.), when it comes to GPS waypoints, things can take a sharp left turn into unknown territory, especially when you throw in a sprinkle of Mac vs PC! After what should have been a 10 minute job that turned into the length of a soccer game we managed to get the data from our geographical information systems into the required flight navigation system format. 

 

 
Waypoint discussions

 

 
Planned CryoSAR flight tracks
 

 
Planned lidar, snow radar and camera flight tracks

Once the flight tracks were established, we were good to go. On the ground there are many tests and checks that need to be made before the aircraft can fly. Also, all of the systems need to be switched on before take-off to ensure that the instruments are at least able to run. In addition, discussions about what parameters need to be set on the instruments and what sequence of flying needs to be done. For Thursday, the UW CryoSAR was to be flown first so Jeff and Richard discussed how this would be activated and also what parameter set is needed. 

 

 
Inserting storage drives before take-off


  Martin and Christian checking instrument status pre-flight


 

Jeff and Richard discussing radar parameters
 
 

Happy Arttu!

 

And then we flew. For 3.5 hours. The weather was great and the pilot skill at keeping the aircraft along straight and narrow tracks is amazing. Alan is very skilled at flying with much experience and Shannon is demonstrating a really strong aptitude to survey flying.

 

 
View through the window

 

 
View from the cockpit

 
Complex terrain, in terms of snow accumulation

 
Lakes and land

 
View of one of the riparian zones along a creek

 
Jeff – deep in thought


Snow radar data capture

And for those who like videos....one of the camp at TVC.

 


In all, it was a successful day. We had some issues with the lidar and so it was a shortened flight day but the SAR system seemed to function well and the snow radar was also functional. After flying for about 3.5 hours, Jeff and Richard decided to install a calibration target north of town.  This is important for calibrating and positioning the radar imagery that we collect.


 
Setting up a corner reflector I the field


Finally, as they say in marathon running “it’s all in the preparation”. Fortunately for us, the AWI team making this possible have been working for a year in the lead up to this campaign so the fact that we are able to fly and acquire the data that we did, is in large part thanks to the meticulous work of Martin and his team at AWI.

 

Tomorrow: the Arctic Ocean. 




 
 

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