May 10, 2011
After our successful switch of the helicopter for a plane with the Switchyard team we decided we wanted to do some airborne electromagnetic induction (HEM or HEM Bird) surveys using the helicopter. Once we determined the weather was good, I quickly used a Synthetic Aperture Radar image to pick our survey flight path and get some positions for the pilot to navigate to.
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| Synthetic Aperture Radar image from Envisat ASAR showing Nares Strait and our proposed flight path. |
After getting Christian's okay on the points we moved our sensor over to the helicopter, only to find out it wouldn't turn on.
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| Our HEM Bird, her name is Rosie (after the Alberta Rose) sitting near the helicopter waiting for take off. |
After fiddling for 3 + hours we finally solved the problem, of course, it was already lunch time so we reconvened for lunch. Just before take off, we setup a GPS base station, which really interested one of the local residents of Alert, a wolf. Despite yelling at it to go away and chasing it a bit, the wolf was very persistent, coming within 5 feet of us. I'm not sure if it was the GPS unit, or the pair of mitts a team member had put down on the ground as we worked, but the wolf was very interested in us.
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| The wolf who was interested in our differential GPS unit. Considering I only have a small point in shoot with only a little bit of optical zoom, you can imagine how close he was. |
Nonetheless we finished setting up the GPS station to record while the flight took place and just hoped the wolf would decide not to disturb it. In the end, the GPS unit was completely undisturbed.
The airborne thickness survey was about 180 nautical miles and was about two hours long. I loaned Alec my camera since his stopped working at the beginning of this campaign. The flight path took them over land towards Nares Strait and the team were lucky enough to see some muskox.
After about two hours the helicopter returned and then Alec and I went with the helicopter to deploy a buoy at approximately 83.5N, 55W. This buoy measures air pressure and air temperature as well as its location so that we can get information such as ice drift, air temperature and pressure. As you can imagine, there are not very many weather stations in the Arctic Ocean, so the data from the few stations, plus all the buoys helps to improve weather forecasts and monitoring of the global environment. The flight was quick (135 knots (135 nautical miles per hour), but we had to cover about 80nm each way. I had front seat with the pilot and was able to learn a bit from him about how to fly a helicopter.
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| Muskox on Ellesmere Island not too far from Alert |
After about two hours the helicopter returned and then Alec and I went with the helicopter to deploy a buoy at approximately 83.5N, 55W. This buoy measures air pressure and air temperature as well as its location so that we can get information such as ice drift, air temperature and pressure. As you can imagine, there are not very many weather stations in the Arctic Ocean, so the data from the few stations, plus all the buoys helps to improve weather forecasts and monitoring of the global environment. The flight was quick (135 knots (135 nautical miles per hour), but we had to cover about 80nm each way. I had front seat with the pilot and was able to learn a bit from him about how to fly a helicopter.
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| Our helicopter is ready for take off after we have deployed the canister buoy. |
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| Frost flowers on very thin ice in the open water between floes |
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| Some new ice formed in the open water between ice floes |
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| Open water, called a lead, in the ice |
After returning back to Alert and grabbing some supper, Alec, Christian, Ian and I, went back down to process our salinity/texture cores. We finished around 10:30pm, just in time for a social beverage at the bar.
May 11, 2011
Well May 11 was another beautiful day, just like all the others this trip. I feel that I have glossed over the weather a bit on the posts for this trip simply because it has been so good. Normally we are affected by days of fog, poor visibility, and sometimes high winds. This trip has been remarkable in that we have had 1 morning with fog, which dissipated by lunch and we could still go out that afternoon. To get so many beautiful weather days (sunny, -5 to -15C) in a row at Alert is a rare thing.
Christian, Ian and I loaded the helicopter first thing in the morning for another HEM flight, this time to the west to the Ward Hunt Ice shelf. Ward Hunt is a marine ice shelf (frozen sea water) that is several thousand years. However over the past decade Ward Hunt and the other marine ice shelves on Ellesmere Island have been breaking up and disappearing. The pieces that break off float in the waters and would pose a significant shipping hazard, as they are quite thick. Ever since our flight over the floating tongue of the Petermann Glacier on Greenland with the Canadian Coast Guard ship Henry Larsen (with Humfrey Melling and the Canadian Arctic Throughflow Study) in August of 2009, our group has realized that we can make measurements through much thicker ice than we originally thought. While the error in the measurements increases, the results remain valuable. Below are some photos
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| Pieces of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf |
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| Glacier ice or part of the Ward Hunt ice shelf |
Christian has tried for several years now to get to Ward Hunt Island to make a survey of the shelf and this year we were finally successful. With the laser scanner, laser profiler, differential GPS, inertial navigation system, and the EM thickness coils onboard our new HEM bird we should have an interesting data set. The laser scanner is a rotating laser scanner that basically scans the surface below it from left to right, and it spins at about 50 complete turns per second, giving us a nice scan of the change in the height of the surface and features below.
However, we did encounter some problems, we had a failure of our DGPS and potentially the INS data during parts of the flight. However, with the handheld GPS we had in the helicopter we should able to reconstruct the position/timing of the flight and data files.
We made several passes over the ice shelf and over sea ice along the way to Ward Hunt. We landed on Ward hunt to refuel and had a quick look around the camp that exists there. The area is in Quttinirpaaq National Park so there are several building on the island. We then flew out over the shelf and out over the sea ice to the north of the island before turning around and going down Disraeli Fjord and then over land back towards Alert due to time/fuel considerations.
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| Glacier at the head of disraeli fjord |
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| Crevasses in the glacier at the head of Disraeli fjord. |
Near Alert we made several more passes over the CryoVEx fast ice site transect from my trip in April in order to acquire laser scanner and HEM thickness data. We flew several passes at different heights to change the total size and spatial resolution of the laser scanner swath. After about four hours we returned to Alert, had a quick lunch break (boxed lunches) and then Christian and I departed Alert again in the helicopter to deploy our time lapse camera package on Cape Joseph Henry near Alert. The camera is supposed to take 1 photo each hour for the next year. I am really hoping it works as it was something I did the testing on, and well I only have myself to blame if it doesn’t, it has already caused me some nightmares as there will be no way to know if it worked until we go back in a year….yikes!!!
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| See if you can spot the camera |
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| Can you see it now? |
We returned back to the base just after supper and then proceeded to start packing up all our gear for our departure on May 12.
May 12, 2011
Okay, well this was our last day in Alert, so we should be busy finishing packing, right? Well sort of, we had deployed an Ice Mass Balance buoy on the fast ice near Alert for the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory of the US ARMY (C.R.R.E.L.) but the buoy was having some major issues. The under water sonar that makes it possible to determine the change in ice thickness by measuring the distance from the sensor to the bottom of the ice stopped working shortly after being deployed. We made a few more visits to the buoy to try to fix it, but without luck. So Christian and Alec went out by skidoo on Thursday morning and repaired the buoy, hopefully for good, as it was our last chance to do make repairs. Then in the afternoon at about 3pm our Twin Otter arrived from Resolute Bay to pick us up and bring us back to Resolute. After so many trips and campaigns I am now able to sleep on some planes, and I find the Twin Otter very conducive to sleep, so I used the chance to nap.
That night we caught up with Ben back at PCSP and relaxed a bit.
May 13 and 14th, 2011
Ben, who has been extremely busy helping Christine Michel of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada in Winnipeg, had collected a lot of data while we were away. We used the increased manpower and the fact that Ben leaves on Sunday May 15, 2011 for a circumnavigation of Cornwallis Island (where Resolute Bay is) by skidoo to motivate ourselves to process some cores that Ben had collected in the vicinity of Resolute (Wellington Channel, Barrow Strait and McDougal Sound). Ben had collected 7 more texture/salinity cores to section and measure, which we just finished this (May 14, 2011) morning.
We also unpacked our airplane and spent the majority of the morning swapping, organizing and backing up data files. May 14th brought along more of the same, we finished the texture cores, packed up gear and then waited for the plane.
I am looking forward to being home again. I will try to post some more blogs in the coming weeks. I think I will like post any updates I get from Ben while he is on his circumnavigation (he plans to text me with the satellite phone) both here and on his Facebook wall. But I know I am usually pretty bad for not posting when I am not on trips.
Well that is all, I hope you enjoyed hearing about the CASIMBO 2011 field campaign. I will post more later when we have some preliminary results or something cool comes up
Cheers
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