All,
A successful OIB Northern Peninsula mission was completed today in nearly ideal weather conditions. This clear weather today on the Antarctic Peninsula is very rare as the surrounding ocean waters and wind conditions generally cause clouds and fog in this region. We did have a few isolated patches of fog, and the southwest-most corner of the flight lines had clouds below the aircraft. All OIB remote sensing equipment reported good data collection today (with the optical instruments losing about 30 minutes of data to clouds, and with the exception of the ATM FLIR camera which encountered a data system issue resulting in data loss of the first half of the mission. The FLIR recorded the second half of the mission successfully.
The scenery on the Antarctic Peninsula glaciers is absolutely spectacular. Crane Glacier is perhaps (to my eye) the best example of our scenery today, so all my photo images on this email are from the Crane mission line (about 20 minutes). The flight lines took us over the remnants of the Larson Ice Shelf, with cloud patches on the eastern portion of some lines, but we were rarely out of sight of amazing views.
We’ll attempt another mission tomorrow, weather and aircraft permitting.
wide view of today’s mission
detail of the flight lines
I believe all photos below are from the flight line climbing up Crane Glacier today.
An interesting ATM T6 wide scan lidar elevation map of a crevasse field on one of the glaciers today. Crevasses are about 10 meters deep