Timeline refresh. A #fieldwork photo from 2012, with my surveying team on #SIPEX2012 .
We set out a "no go zone" of about 100 x 100 m for remote sensing calval purposes. We were always first on the ice, racing to get flags out indicating where other teams should avoid. Here we've done the critical parts, communicated to the ship about where to avoid, and are setting out the last corner. And importantly, taking a moment to absorb the place we are in.
🏔️ ❤️ ❄️
From earlier the same day - putting up the 'false north' GPS + reflector. This was one end of a baseline established on each work site, so we could reference everything we did to a drifting and rotating ice floe... Somewhere back toward the ship is a total station sitting at the [0,0] point that this is referenced to. After this point is set, we go back and resect a total station to a point *not* [0,0], so we can install a GNSS antenna at [0,0].
After we were done, the airborne component could lift off! This helicopter carred a lidar, medium format camera and snow radar.
I worked on the lidar and camera data, and used it to make the first ever composite of 3D photogrammetry + lidar + field observations on sea ice...
All of that stuff let us make maps like this one for the first time ever. Less handwaving and more knowing about where measurements are made, how they relate to each other. A physical geography of sea ice!
Unfortunately none of it continues today. Back to reality...
...so why? How did we convince a government to spend $lots on letting us do this?
what good is it for anyone except happy snaps and maps?
Here's a broad brush diagram of sea ice in the ocean system. You know all that upwelling water driving fisheries and cool imagery of bait balls and ocean life off African coasts? Its made by oceans freezing off Antarctica. The spring krill bloom that whales eat? Happens because of ice melting in the ocean...
There's a lot going in oceans very few people ever see let alone visit. Especially in or near winter time!
Yes we can do things from space. This next diagram shows some relative scales. Those ice features in the photos above? Not visible sorry.
Things have improved a bit with ICESat-2, Sentinels, GEDI and some upcoming missions. However we're still more or less stuck at a very blurry picture.
Especially if products are also integrated over time...
...we can't observe everything in situ, so those spaceborne instruments zooming around collecting large area data are super important (to your weather forecasts, your fishing trip, whether your roses bloom when you expect them to).
All the work above was about understanding what is integrated into a satellite data point. Are we seeing what we think we see?
Are our assumptions correct?
Are the numbers we use in weather and climate models still valid?
Unfortunately due to funding we didn't realise the full picture - direct coincident airborne and satellite observations, with airborne data tuned using spatially-appropriate validation points.
We did confirm a longstanding bias in observations 😬, which [is still] a heuristic interplay of field site selection, ship navigation choices, satellite data using those to tune results, and models using all of the above to tune outputs..
a heavy momentum to shift!
...to avoid falling into snark I'll leave it there.
To recap: we did new and expensive and difficult things on sea ice because people on planet earth rely on accurate weather forecasts and want to understand seasonality. All this stuff would probably play some role in your insurance premiums even!
I've *always* held that in mind on the ice. Why am I here? to get a paper? well yes, however thats a by-product of [see above].
So there's a prerogative to be as audacious as possible. Move the needle as far as possible every time...
...because we never know at the time what heuristics we are bound by if we just do the known stuff.
And we might never go back. So it is imperative to think about what data we can collect, and how, to help paint in gaps we can't see.
/fin
Dr. 🏔️❄️🗺️📊🎨⛷️🧗🏻♂️🛶