• De-icing the P3 this morning.

    There was light snow early this morning. The deicing truck uses both air and de-icing fluid to remove snow from the aircraft.

  • Most of the day, the sea ice looked like this...

  • The view at the North Pole.

    There was a hazy layer below us, obscuring details, but the ATM lidars handled the conditions.

  • ATM CAMBOT image of the 2Dgrees party

    ( 3 folks and sleds (dark dots in right center)) skiing to the North Pole.

  • The ATM FLIR image of a adventurer sled party

    The ATM FLIR image of a adventurer sled party skiing to the North Pole. The yellow spot in the center with a “trail” to right is the sled party from the above image. The trail to the right is the residual heat from the sleds passing over the snow and ice.

  • Overlay of both CAMBOT and FLIR images

  • More sea ice

  • More sea ice

  • More sea ice

  • Svalbard Mountains

  • Post mission weather

    Post mission weather (following a textbook cross wind landing) at Longyearbyrn was “brutal”; strong winds and blowing snow.

  • And the NASA P3 crew has to do their post flight work!

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Sitrap writen by: NASA/GSFC/Wallops Flight Facility

A successful “Sea Ice- Svalbard North” mission was completed today in mostly clear conditions, with a few occasional hazy patches.
Only one hazy patch on the southbound line interfered with optical remote sensing for about 15 minutes, otherwise all OIB sea ice remote sensor instruments reported good data collection.


We flew the “east” leg of the pattern north, and after overflying the North Pole, we also overflew a team of adventurers who were flown to a point 120 miles south of the Pole and are ski/hiking with sleds to the Pole. (www.2Degrees.com).
These folks placed a couple of GPS/Satellite trackers for us and made some snow depth measurements as we flew over, and there are some interesting images from the overflight below.

We hope to complete the second Svalbard-based sea ice mission tomorrow, as always if weather permits.