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The 2010 Antarctic Operation Ice Bridge (OIB) campaign was expected, in large part, to mirror the 2009 mission. The home base, Puntas Arenas, remained the same. The same key players were at the helm. The same plane, NASA’s DC-8, would again zig-zag and swoop over carefully charted flight paths, again loaded with CReSIS’ unique suite of radars and...
In June 2010, two CReSIS students and one staff member had the opportunity to attend the Network for Ice sheet and Climate Evolution (NICE) international conference on communicating climate change. One of the speakers, Dr. Sylvie Thoron, weighs in on her thoughts on the outcome of the COP16 meeting in Cancun. Dr. Thoron is a professor of economics...
Mrs. Sildiane Quinteros is a fourth-grade teacher at Whittier Elementary School in Kansas City, KS, site of CReSIS’ successful Family Science Night last April. Mrs. Quinteros discusses the impact Cheri Hamilton’s lessons have had on her 22 students both inside and outside the classroom. How long have students in your class been working with her?...
Having read news reports of the demonstrations, arrests, and general chaos at COP15 in Copenhagen in December 2009, I was interested in understanding what groups would be attending COP16 in Cancun, what they would do, and how the government would respond. Three trainees, including myself, from the NSF C-CHANGE (Climate Change, Humans and Nature in...
The recent COP16 meeting held in Cancún had little to live up to. Following last year’s failure to yield a comprehensive agreement at the close of COP15 in Copenhagen, policymakers worldwide warned in the weeks leading up to the Nov 30-Dec 11 meeting that expectations were low, and that the likelihood of any sort of agreement, let alone a legally...
Sorcha Hyland-Sidener joined CReSIS as a part-time Program Assistant in December 2010. She also works part-time as Outreach Coordinator at KU’s Spencer Museum of Art. Hyland-Sidener attended the University College Dublin and hopes that she can offer an artistic and creative mindset in thinking about climate science. She said that she was attracted...
Researcher Claude Laird sits inside the PistenBully, a red box on treads that resembles an Antarctic tractor, gripping his seat as it moves unsteadily forward. The wind howls, and outside he can see only pure, blinding white. His eyes are glued to the radar screen, searching out sharp edges in range hyperbolas that could reveal a dangerous...
A light gust of wind pushed scuttling leaves across the Spooner Hall lawn on November 5th. The weather was fitting. Inside, KU’s C-CHANGE NSF IGERT program hosted a symposium entitled, “Preservation and Innovation: Climate Change, Agriculture and Wind Energy in the Kansas Flint Hills.” Adam Sundberg, a PhD candidate in history, organized the event...
The worlds of opera and polar ice sheets rarely intersect. On April 8th, however, the two fields found a rare point of convergence during the KU School of Music’s Helianthus Chamber Operas. Lisa Neher’s “White Horizon,” one of four operas performed, followed the true story of Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian explorer, and his attempt to be the first...
On February 9, Jack Kaye, Associate Director for Research in the Earth Science Division of NASA, delivered a presentation entitled “Space-Based View of a Changing Climate and Its Implications” at the Dole Institute of Politics. On February 10, he presented “NASA Satellite Observations and their Role in the Study of Global Change” to CReSIS faculty...
For those who love travel, faraway places, and scientific innovation, a simple yellow portrait frame conjures far more meaning than does a mere monochromatic rectangle. The image, a picture KU senior Julia Guard would be quick to identify, is the logo of the National Geographic Society. The Society recently hired Guard as an intern, a prestigious...
Anyone that owned a TV before cable knows that fiddling with an antenna is no easy task. Supersize that antenna, multiply it by 15 and mount it on an airplane, and even an expert at getting television reception would be lost. When working with high-tech antennas, though, CReSIS engineers feel right at home. In preparation for the 2011 Greenland...
Jonathan Bamber, PhD Director, Bristol Glaciology Centre, University of Bristol Jonathan Bamber is a professor in physical geography. He graduated from Bristol University with a degree in Physics in 1983 and completed a Ph.D at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, in glaciology and remote sensing. He then spent eight years...
The power and enormity of the topic was palpable from the moment the doors opened. Thunderous cracks and massive splashes of sound brought color to the grayscale imagery of “Mutatis Mutandis,” a special sensory exhibition that represented two natural occurrences spanning hundreds of thousands of years: glacial movement and melting. The installment...
The CReSIS Phase II Advisory Board , a select group of distinguished scientists, engineers, professors and business leaders, convened at the University of Kansas on Thursday, April 28 and Friday, April 29, 2011. Board members spent two days participating in discussions concerning every facet of CReSIS deployments, technology, and research results...
Elizabeth City, N.C.: Indiana University and CReSIS graduate student Jerome Mitchell will host a cloud computing workshop at Elizabeth City State University from June 7–July 5, 2011. Cloud computing, CReSIS’ primary data-management resource, is the growing concept of remote data storage and processing. Mitchell said the ultimate objective of the...
Judith Riley (formerly Berglund) joined CReSIS as a Project Manager in January 2011. She received her B.S. in Geology from Wheaton College in Illinois and an M.S. in Geography with an emphasis in Geospatial Technology and Remote Sensing from the University of South Carolina. Most recently she served as a technical contractor for the NASA Applied...
Before CReSIS embarked on its 2011 field season, a few adjustments had to be made. For the P-3 aircraft, this meant major structural and electrical changes to the radar depth sounder system and the antenna arrays. In early March, the CReSIS team began field operations on the P-3: first in test flights out of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in...
Check out the Meridian UAV's first radar sample results from NEEM camp! For more information about the Meridian UAV, click here .
Accra, Ghana is approximately 6,253 miles away from Lawrence, Kan. To put it in CReSIS terms, that’s roughly equivalent to a round trip from CReSIS headquarters in Lawrence, Kansas to Jakobshavn Glacier, Greenland, and then some. For Rockson Armaah and Ignatius Williams, this meant an 11.5 hour flight from Accra to Atlanta and a subsequent 1.3...
A team of scientists and engineers stuck in an isolated, snowed-in hotel in remote Greenland. Their eyes are glued to their computer screens and they are fervently trying to analyze something. It sounds like the plot of a science fiction horror film – John Carpenter’s The Thing on the other end of the world. But on their March 15 to May 6...
Out in North Lawrence, past the Teepee, “purveyors of potables and edibles”, past the one-and-only “authentic” Jellystone Park, the Airport Motel, and seemingly endless Kansas fields, past even Don’s Diesel and a retro silver camper, sits a hidden-away hangar. On any given day, one can easily spot a Valkyrie motorcycle, a gleaming yellow corvette...
I first started studying Byrd Glacier almost 10 years ago as a new PhD student at the University of Maine. I was using a new suite of NASA satellite imagery, capable of imaging farther south than previous sensors, to derive ice velocities. Byrd Glacier was my first guinea pig, and I spent almost 18 months pouring over images, trying to develop the...
Kuang-Chen Hsu joined CReSIS in June 2011 as the Adobe Flash Developer. Hsu, who most recently received Master’s Degree from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, is working toward earning his Ph.D. in Education Technology from the University of Kansas. In his free time, he enjoys traveling and watching sports. While at CReSIS, he hopes to learn...
Stephen Price’s paper “Committed sea-level rise for the next century from Greenland ice sheet dynamics during the past decade,” was published in the May 17, 2011 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). Dr. Price, a scientist with the Fluid Dynamics and Solid Mechanics Group at Los Alamos...
Elizabeth City, N.C.: CReSIS partner institution, Elizabeth City State University (ECSU), was recently ranked America’s No. 2 public college in the South region and the No. 17 Historically Black College of 2011 by U.S. News & World Report. U.S. News & World Report determines its collegiate rankings using standard indicators such as...
On November 5, Gloria J. Brown-Simmons, an Aesthetic Engineer who uses visual art to make planetary data understandable and relatable, visited CReSIS partner Elizabeth City State University in Elizabeth City, N.C., to give a lecture entitled “Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment” as part of the Center of Excellence in Remote...
The CReSIS winter 2011 Antarctica field season is already underway, and a total of three deployments will have initiated by the end of the year. The winter field season will be highlighted by a NASA DC-8 mission, an NSF Twin Otter mission, and an NSF Meridian UAV mission. DC-8: NASA Operation IceBridge CReSIS and NASA’s Operation IceBridge mission...
Sam Buchanan joined CReSIS as an Undergraduate Research Assistant in October, 2011. He is currently a sophomore at the University of Kansas studying Electrical Engineering. At CReSIS, Buchanan will work with Signal Processing. While working at the Center, he hopes to gain experience by eventually coordinating and undertaking a large, individual...
CReSIS graduate research assistant José Vélez Gonzales was recently awarded the NASA Harriett G. Jenkins Fellowship. Jose Vélez Gonzales is a US Citizen and native of Puerto Rico. He has worked for CReSIS as a GRA since 2008 and is currently working toward his Ph.D. in Geophysics. He plans to use the fellowship in May 2012 to gather radar and...
On Tuesday, Sept. 13, and Wednesday, Sept. 14, the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets hosted the 2011 STC Directors Meeting in Lawrence, Kansas. Directors from each of the 17 National Science Foundation (NSF) Science and Technology Centers (STC) arrived at the Oread Hotel on Monday night and spent the following two days participating in round...
On Sept. 19, 2011, Dr. Nanna Karlsson, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for Ice and Climate, paid a visit to CReSIS headquarters in Lawrence, Kan., to present a lecture on “Retrieving basal conditions from Central and North East Greenland using radar data.” Karlsson’s primary research interests lie in using ice-...
A few new faces will be riding along the CReSIS radar sled this winter. NASA’s Dr. Lora Koenig, Dr. Ludovic Brucker of the Goddard Space Flight Center, and Ph.D. candidate Clément Miège of the University of Utah visited CReSIS headquarters at the University of Kansas from Sept. 21 to Sept. 23, 2011. During their visit, the three familiarized...
This summer, CReSIS Graduate Research Assistants (GRAs) Emily Arnold and Teresa Stumpf took the opportunity to advance their studies of remote sensing and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) while absorbing the cultural benefits of traveling abroad. Upon returning, both Stumpf and Arnold submitted papers to CReSIS highlighting their summer experience...
The September 2011 issue of IEEE Spectrum magazine featured a story on radars developed by CReSIS for sounding and imaging of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. The paper, “A Next-Generation Ice Radar,” highlights the Center’s recent trip to Greenland in the P-3 aircraft and explains the fundamental ideas of using radars to monitor glaciers...
Introducing young children to topics as complex as glaciology and radars can be a tall task. In order to facilitate a strong connection between grade school students and this uncommon and complex subject matter, the CReSIS Education Team took their lessons to a platform that children are already familiar with. In April 2011, Graduate Research...
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 The Polar Current: Climate Change News
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