Snow4Flow
NASA Science ·
Investigating snow accumulation and ice flow of glaciers across the Arctic to better project what they will look like by the end of this century. The post Snow4Flow appeared first on NASA Science .
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NASA’s Snow4Flow mission will investigate snow accumulation and the ice flow of glaciers across the Arctic. Snow4Flow scientists will fly over hundreds of glaciers, and set up field camps atop glaciers in Alaska, to collect precise data on the snow accumulation, ice thickness, and elevations of these remote regions.
Mission Type
Launch
Objective
Glaciers contain less than 1% of Earth’s frozen freshwater, but they have a big impact. Glacial meltwater, as opposed to water coming off the large ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, is responsible for more than 20% of current sea level rise. With temperatures in the Arctic rising much faster than the global average, researchers want to determine how Northern Hemisphere glaciers will respond, and the potential impacts on coastal communities, water resources, and economies worldwide.
To get the best projections of future glacier behavior, researchers need detailed data to understand their current state. The campaign is designed to gather information about how much snow falls annually on glaciers, and how much ice the glaciers currently hold. Combining these observations with satellite data and computer modelling, researchers will investigate two questions:
Researchers will measure hundreds of glaciers across Alaska, Svalbard, southeastern Greenland, and the Canadian High Arctic, deploying to two regions each spring in 2027, 2028, and 2029.
The team will travel along glaciers in a Basler aircraft, equipped with a laser altimeter and a microwave radar sounder inside the cabin and pointed downward, plus a long-wavelength radar sounder antenna towed behind it. On a handful of Alaskan glaciers, scientists will land on the ice, set up camp, and dig snow pits and drill snow cores to study the layers up close.
With this new wealth of data to incorporate into the latest generation of computer models, the Snow4Flow team aims to improve our understanding of how glaciers might change in the future.
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