SI - SIZRS Zigzag
OIB - P-3 Orion 03/15/14 Science Report
sitrep text
IceBridge completed another sea ice mission today; the Sea Ice SIZRA mission.. This morning after checking the automated weather observations from Point Barrow, we believed that the flight line over the SIZRS surface ice research line was flyable (Barrow reported 25,000' scattered clouds just before takeoff). As NASA 426 transited north from Fairbanks, the weather at Barrow quickly deteriorated, and when we arrived at the SIZRS study site we had a thick layer of clouds down on the surface (reported to extend from 700 feet to 1200 feet from other pilot reports), We made one pass over the SIZRS line at 1500' collecting radar data but no lidar or usable camera data, and decided to head west to our offshore lines. The initial offshore line had about 30 nautical miles of clouds, which quickly cleared as we flew north offshore. For the remainder of the mission, we only encountered a few places with thin to moderate sea ice fog, and had mostly sunny skies. The IceBridge sea ice remote sensing instruments all reported good data collection (including the DMS Applanix INS which had problems yesterday, but received replacement data card and new firmware).
We'll return to the SIZRA next week on a different mission, weather permitting.
Tomorrow is a "hard down" day for crew rest, with no access to the aircraft permitted.
IceBridge will resume flying missions on Monday, as always weather permitting.