Grassroots September 2016, Vol. 16, No. 3 | Page 17

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water that form as ice melts. Their darker surface
can absorb more sunlight
ight and accelerate the
melting process. IceBridge is flying out of Barrow,
Alaska, during sea ice melt season to capture melt
pond observations at a scale never before achieved.
Recent studies have found that the formation of
melt ponds early in the summerr is a good predictor
of the yearly minimum sea ice extent in September.
"No one has ever, from a remote sensing
standpoint, mapped the large-scale
scale depth of melt
ponds on sea ice," said Nathan Kurtz, IceBridge’s
project scientist and a sea ice researcher at NASA
Goddard. "The information we’ll collect is going to
show how much water is retained in melt ponds
and what kind of topography is needed on the sea
ice to constrain them, which will help improve melt
pond models."
Operation IceBridge is a NASA air
airborne
mission that has been flying multiple campaigns at

both poles each year since 2009, with a goal of
maintaining critical continuity of observations of
sea ice and the ice sheets of Greenland and
Antarctica
At the same time, NASA researchers began in
earnest this year a nearly decade-long,
decade
multifaceted field study of Arctic ecosystems in Alaska
and Canada. The Arctic-Boreal
Arctic
Vulnerability
Experiment (ABoVE) will study how forests,
permafrost and other ecosystems are responding to
rising temperatures in the Arctic, where climate
change is unfolding faster than anywhere else on
the planet.
ABoVE consists of dozens individual
experiments that over years will study the region's
changing forests, the cycle of carbon movement
between the atmosphere and land, thawing
permafrost, the relationship between fire
fi
and
climate
change,
and
mor
more.

Figure 2: The first six months of 2016 were the warmes
war mest six-month period in NASA’s modern temperature record,
which dates to 1880. Credits: NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Grassroots

September 2016

Vol 16 No. 3