Last Friday, July 29, was the first real science flight of the mission. Driving down to the base at 4am, Mumford and Sons’ ‘Cave’ blasting through the stereo, I definitely felt excited (and a little sleepy). On-board we powered up the instruments and ran through our pre-flight checklist. We’d made some changes the previous day […]
Hi there! Our team got out of the field a few days ago after a successful field campaign with a lot of great data to analyze! For the coming blog posts, we will be sharing with you the different kind of measurements we made during our stay at the ice camp and but also describe […]
In the last two weeks, we’ve wrapped up the test flights and major preparations for NASA’s ATom mission. ATom is an airborne science experiment aboard the DC-8 flying laboratory that will study the most remote parts of the Earth’s atmosphere. We want to learn how much pollution reaches areas most people would consider untouched by […]
I’m Christina Williamson, a postdoctoral scientist at CIRES CU-Boulder/NOAA-ESRL interested in Atmospheric Aerosols, the small particles in the air that cause haze, and on which clouds are formed. I’m working with a few colleagues from NOAA to take a suite of instruments on NASA’s ATom mission that will measure the number and size of particles […]
Take 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, 0.9 percent argon, 0.03 percent carbon dioxide – that’s 99.93 percent of the atmosphere. But the trace gases and airborne particles that make up that last approximately 0.07 percent are what NASA’s Atmospheric Tomography (ATom) mission is interested in. ATom is a chemistry mission to study the movement […]
We are ready for the big day! Tomorrow (Wednesday) we will start our put-in to the field. With a total of 5 helicopter flights all our gear, science equipment and the entire team will be flown to our field site, approx. 130 km northwest of Kulusuk. However, we have to take the weather in account; […]
Welcome back to our blog! We’re here for one more season of field work on the Greenland ice sheet to study the firn aquifer. Surface meltwater percolates through the upper layers of compacting snow, or firn, and pools inside the air space between sow grains, forming a large reservoir of liquid water within the ice […]
Hi there, After an early breakfast, our team is getting ready to put in our ice camp. We met with the pilots around 8:30am for a departure at 9 am. The flight to the ice camp was quick, about 20 minutes. Beautiful views of the fjords leaving Kangerlussuaq and then on our climb onto the […]
This summer, we have the chance to be part of a team of researchers studying the efficiency of the drainage system over the ablation zone of the Greenland ice sheet. This NASA Cryosphere program funded project, titled “Drainage Efficiency of the Greenland Ice Sheet” is studying the production, transport and export of Greenland Ice Sheet […]
As our 2016 field campaign comes to an end, I find myself proud of all the great data we collected. Our primary objective was to sample enough sites of different ages, land use, and species composition to be able to say something meaningful about changing fire regimes and the interactions between wildfire and timber harvest. […]
