The OIB team completed the sea ice “Chukchi West” mission today. During pre-mission preparations we noted that the weather (forecast and satellite images) degraded from the previous forecasts but Chukchi West is a high priority mission and our time in Fairbanks is limited, therefore the decision was made to attempt the mission. During the flight today we did encounter widespread regions of low clouds and fog, and we spent significant time at reduced altitude (from our nominal 1500′ above the ice) to continue to collect optical camera and laser data below the clouds. Data was successfully collected over much of the science lines, with only a few regions of thicker clouds blocking the optical sensors.
All OIB sea ice remote sensing instruments reported good data collection.
Thanks to our hard working P3 flight crew and OIB science teams, we’ve flown 6 consecutive OIB flights, and reached the aircrew duty limit, so tomorrow will be a “hard down” rest day. We plan a sea ice “South Transect” science mission returning to Thule Greenland on Tuesday, takeoff time TBD.
Sea ice photos and ATM data plots below.
Most of today’s flight track (tracker stopped at UTC midnight)
Meandering frozen river on our return
Meandering frozen river on our return
Clouds over sea ice
ATM T6 wide scan elevation plots of sea ice
