Welcome to the Arctic 2024 campaign



Welcome to the Icebird and CryoSAR Canadian High Arctic 2024 campaign blog. We are group of scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute (or AWI) in Germany, the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI), and the University of Waterloo (UW) in Canada, interested in the science of snow and ice. Our expertise lies at the interface of geophysics, physical geography, physics and engineering and our science has implications for our understanding of the cryosphere (all places where water is frozen) and its impact on climate change.

This campaign, called Icebird-CAN24, focuses on observing snow and ice using remote sensing observations mounted on an aircraft. The photo above is the Polar 5 AWI research aircraft, a reconditioned 1943 DC-3 which is used for Arctic and Antarctic observation science. The goal of this campaign is to observe the Arctic cryosphere at different places in Canada from the Polar 5 using state of the art measurements: AWI's wideband snow radar, lidar, EM induction system (Icebird) and digital camera system, and UW's state-of-the-art CryoSAR imaging radar. Together these systems can provide key information to help us estimate snow accumulation on land and ice, ice thickness, and the condition of the land surface.

The April 2024 survey plan is to fly over key snow and ice sites in the Northwest Territories (Trail Valley Creek, West Husky Lakes, Beaufort Sea), and Nunavut (Resolute Bay, Cambridge Bay, Gjoa Haven, Pond Inlet, Devon Ice Cap). Many of these places have ongoing ground-based research field experiments that will support our airborne measurements. Others have unique aspects that we aim to explore further.

There has been significant advanced planning to make this effort possible. But we are now ready. So over the next 3 weeks, we will provide updates on what we are doing.

Test flight: Saturday April 6th

We successfully completed a test flight over Georgian Bay on 6th April. This was to check our instruments were functioning. The out-and-back flight was a great chance for the team to test the systems in the air and to see how the cabin configuration will work – and to try on our fetching survival suits which are to be worn when we fly over water. 

 

 

   

     


Day 1: Toronto – Yellowknife

Having successfully conducted a pre-campaign test flight over Georgian Bay last Saturday, the team was ready to fly north today to Inuvik with the normal stop over in Yellowknife. The UW team set out from Ontario early on Tuesday 9th and had a great day with Margot, from the UW research group who lives in YK. Lunch at Bullock’s fish restaurant was followed by a walk around town before dinner at the Woodhouse Brewery and Eatery. Great weather and views, great food and excellent company.

 

     

 

 

Tomorrow: on to Inuvik.




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