Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Africa Water & Sanitation & Hygiene August 2018 | Page 10

NEWS in brief
NASA gets up close with Greenland’s melting ice
A close encounter with Greenland ice during a 2017 OMG field campaign.
Credit: NASA
With a new research plane and a new base to improve
its chances of outsmarting Atlantic hurricanes, NASA’s
Oceans Melting Greenland campaign takes to the sky this
week for its third year of gathering data on how the ocean
around Greenland is melting its glaciers.
OMG’s first two years of operations already collected the
most comprehensive data available on the subject, but
OMG Principal Investigator Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, is hungry for
more. “We’re beginning to see some surprising changes in
the ocean, just since the start of OMG in 2016, that are
affecting the ice,” said Willis, an oceanographer at JPL.
“We want to see if those changes are still there after two
years, and if they’re spreading farther along the Greenland
coast.”
Willis and Project Manager Steve Dinardo, also of JPL, are
leaving for Greenland this week on an airborne campaign
to do just that. For the third year in a row, they will drop
about 250 probes just offshore all around the island, with
some drops close to the fronts of ocean-terminating
glaciers. The probes sink 3,000 feet (1,000 meters) into the
seawater, recording temperature and salinity as they go.
The researchers hope to make their first flight on Aug 22
and complete the work in two to three weeks, depending
on weather.
Beating the Weather
Unfortunately for OMG, the best time to drop probes
into the ocean around Greenland -- the time with the most
open water -- is during hurricane season. “Hurricanes go
up to Greenland to die,” said Dinardo. “In 2016, there
were days the winds were so strong we couldn’t even open
the hangar doors.” Weather groundings stretched the
planned three-week deployment to five weeks.
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Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene • August 2018
Global Highlights
In 2017, weather struck closer to home: Hurricane Harvey
sidelined the Houston-based plane and crew just days
before the campaign was scheduled to begin. Dinardo
managed to locate a viable alternative aircraft and get the
OMG team airborne within a month of the originally
planned start.
This year’s new plane and new base should improve
OMG’s weather odds. The plane, a Basler BT-67 operated
by NASA contractor Airtec, can take off and land on a
shorter runway than either of the planes OMG previously
used. That allows the team to base their east coast
operations in Kulusuk, a small airport in southeastern
Greenland, rather than a larger airport in Iceland. The
lengthy “commute” from Iceland cut into the time
available for research on each flight, and the longer flight
path meant more places where there might be bad weather.
When they complete the east coast drops, the team will
move to Thule, a U.S. air base in northwestern Greenland,
for drops on the western side of the island.
“Being in Greenland the whole time, we can get a little
more up close and personal with the ice sheet and
glaciers,” Willis said.
OMG and Narwhals
The changing ocean around Greenland affects living
creatures as well as glaciers. Narwhals -- smallish whales
with long single tusks -- are uniquely adapted to Arctic
waters, moving seasonally from the open ocean to the
glacier fronts of Greenland and Canada. Kristin Laidre,
a research scientist at the University of Washington in
Seattle, studies these elusive mammals and their habitats.
She quickly saw the value of OMG’s observations,
publishing the first peer-reviewed paper to use OMG data.
Laidre and Ian Fenty of JPL, an OMG co-principal
investigator, are on the west side of Greenland from the
airborne OMG team this week, on a six-day research
cruise. Their team will place moorings in front of three
important glaciers in northwestern Greenland, with
acoustic recorders and OMG data loggers attached to
the mooring chains. These instruments will log ocean
temperature and conductivity (used to calculate salinity)
and detections of narwhals.
This intensive local data set is likely to add new insights
into OMG’s larger-scale measurements, Fenty said.
“Because the instruments will take measurements every
hour for two years, we will get a totally new understanding
of the changing ocean close to the ice,” he noted. “These
data will help us interpret our OMG probe data and allow
us to evaluate and improve our [computer] simulations of
the ocean currents in the area.”
Laidre said, “We don’t know a lot about what’s important