Notes from the Field

Most of the North American population probably wasn’t paying much attention, but the largest Atlantic storm since SANDY safely passed by the mainland well East of Bermuda in Mid-September.  Edouard reached ‘Major Hurricane’ status as a category-3 storm on 9/16 and weakened over colder waters several days later.  Below is a track for Edouard, compared […]

Flying above, below and through clouds in the Arctic gives the ARISE C-130 a different perspective on the world below. Nowhere is this more apparent than through the lenses of ARISE’s digital camera instrument. This instrument – one of many   ARISE uses – captures views of clouds, ocean and ice that are both scenic and […]

Eielson Air Force Base, Fairbanks, Alaska, day 9 of our deployment: We are currently sitting together in our mission support and flight planning room, next to the Thunderdome Hangar on base. We have appropriately named this room, where we dedicate up to 10 hours each day, our WAR room – where we passionately discuss which […]

Editor’s note: The following is a first-hand account of ARISE survey flights by one of the mission’s researchers.   Day 1 (Sep-11-2014) My first ARISE day started early in the morning after a late arrival into Fairbanks on the night before. This important mission’s goal is to map the sea ice and understand the relation between […]

Since I last posted, HS3 has decided to give up on trying to fix AV-1, thus ending my time at NASA Wallops this hurricane season. We came to this decision so we would still have some time to get two of the instruments, including the one I work with, off AV-1 and moved onto a […]

The Spectrometer for Sky-Scanning, Sun-Tracking Atmospheric Research, or 4STAR, is an airborne instrument that measures aerosols (small particles suspended in the atmosphere), gases (ozone for example), and a variety of cloud properties. Currently it is being deployed on the NASA C-130 aircraft on its quest to measure aerosol and cloud properties in the Arctic, helping to […]

After a lengthy waiting period, we have successfully deployed our instrumentation to make aerosol measurements inside a tropical storm/hurricane. As of our last post, instrumentation was mounted aboard the NOAA hurricane hunter aircraft but we were awaiting installation of an inlet.  This is not a trivial task, as any structure mounted to the exterior of […]

Mangrove forests are disappearing faster than any other tropical environment. NASA scientists are working to understand how human activities coupled with land use/ land cover change have altered mangrove environments.

A new NASA airborne campaign known as ARISE, or the Arctic Radiation – IceBridge Sea and Ice Experiment, will take measurements intended to help researchers better understand the role that clouds play in Arctic warming as sea ice conditions change. From Sep. 3 to Oct. 3, researchers flying aboard NASA’s C-130 research aircraft will measure […]