CReSIS in Greenland
Upcoming Deployments
Previous Deployments
Multi-Institute deployment to deploy sensors and preform maintenance on the ATLAS (Autonomous Terrestrial Laser Scanning system) on and around Helheim Glacier in Greenland.
Participants: Leigh Stearns, Michael Shahin (Geology GRA), NRL Cold Regions Lab
UAS-Based Radar Suite for sounding and mapping glaciers. UAV deployment with a Vapor UAS and radar system.
Participants: Emily Arnold and Bailey Miller (AE GRA)
UAS-Based Radar Suite for sounding and mapping glaciers. UAV deployment with a Vapor UAS and radar system.
Participants: Emily Arnold and Bailey Miller (AE GRA)
Loan of a Dual Band Radar to Joe McConnell (Desert Research Institute of Nevada). A test run of the radar that will be deployed to Antarctica 2022-2023. Will conduct a multi-week transit of the Greenland Ice Sheet near EGRIP.
Participants: John Paden (2 weeks)
Two-week mission to Thule Air Force base in Greenland on the NASA P3. Deployment of new Multichannel snow radar to enable tomographic techniques that will generate 3D maps of snow distribution with unprecedented detail and coverage on sea ice and reliable direct sounding of snow on land.
Participants: John Paden, Lee Taylor
European Space Agency and DTU Space - Technical University of Denmark continue their validation program for sea ice and land ice in the Arctic in March/April 2022. The project is carried out in cooperation with the Center for Remote Sensing of the Ice Sheets, University of Kansas, USA (CReSIS), University of Leeds, UK (UL), and Environment & Climate Change Canada (Eureka) under the ESA CryoVEx, St3TART, and SILICE projects.
The 2022 airborne campaign have a particular focus on validation of the dual frequency opportunity of the coordinated CS-2/IS-2 orbits, the so-called CRYO2ICE mission, and the validation of Sentinel-3 and SARAL/AltiKa over sea ice and fast ice respectively.
The airborne surveys will be coordinated with in situ observations at both sea ice and land ice sites collecting surface data; For sea ice: Baffin Bay (sea ice landings with helicopter, also buoy deployments), and possibly also fast ice: near Eureka. For land ice: EGIG line on the Greenland Ice Sheet from (landings on the EGIG line with ski-equipped Twin-Otter).
The airborne surveys will be carried out using a Twin-Otter (reg. TF-POF) from Norlandair, Iceland, in which the instrumentation is certified. Hence, the surveys will start from Akureyri and end there as well after approximately 3 weeks starting with installation and test flight on March 21.
October 22, 2019 to November 21, 2019, we conducted surveys on NASA G-V flights based in Hobart, Tasmania to survey Antarctic land and sea ice. CReSIS deployed the UWB Snow Radar and the MCoRDs/I housed in a new radome custom designed and installed on the aircraft for the 2019 Summer Melt Campaign.
For the 2019 Antarctica GV campaign, we had one test flight on Oct. 17, 2019 and 20 science flights between Oct. 24, 2019 and Nov. 20, 2019. The Figure below shows the flight lines of that campaign. In total, we collected about 5.5 TB data for MCoRDS and 11 TB for snow radar.
From September 4- 15, 2019 CReSIS participated in the NASA Operation Ice Bridge Summer Melt deployment to Thule Greenland to conduct airborne surveys of land and sea ice. Prior to deployment CReSIS designed, manufactured and installed a new radome to house the Snow and MCoRDS radar (Used for the Fall 2019 deployment to Antarctica) . The radome was installed on the belly of the aircraft over two weeks prior to departure.
Operation of the Snow Radar and the MCoRDS/I system onboard the GV required installation of both systems onto the same single-bay rack. 
The Arctic on the NASA P-3: Team members John Paden, Fernando Rodriguez-Morales, Hara Talasila, Renish Thomas and Aaron Wells (IU) deployed to Greenland March 20, 2018 to May 3rd, 2018.
The Arctic on the NASA P-3: From March 9 to May 11, 2017, surveys were flown on the NASA P-3 for flights based out of Thule and Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, and out of Fairbanks, Alaska, to survey Greenlandic and Canadian land ice and Arctic sea ice.