ICEPOD: A Multidisciplinary Imaging System for Application in Polar Regions

The ICEPOD program is in it's third year of a five-year effort to develop a modular airborne ice imaging system mounted on New York Air National Guard (NYANG) LC-130 aircraft to map the surface and sub-surface topography of ice sheets, ice streams, outlet glaciers, ice-shelves and sea-ice for the NSF Major Research Instrumentation program. The project is funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The fundamental goal of the ICEPOD program is to develop an instrumentation package that can capture the dynamics of the changing polar regions, focusing on ice, ice margins and ocean systems. To achieve this the instruments include a Scanning Lidar for precise measurements of the ice surface, Stereo photogrammetry from both a high sensitivity Infra-Red camera and a high resolution Visible Imaging camera to document the ice surface and temperature, sea-ice thickness imaging radar and a deep ice radar used to study interior and basal processes of glaciers, ice streams and ice-sheets. All instrument data sets will be time-tagged and geo-referenced by recording precision GPS satellite data. Aircraft orientation will be corrected using inertial measurement technology integrated into the pod. The vision is that this instrumentation will be operated both on routine flights of the NYANG in the polar regions, such as on missions between McMurdo and South Pole Station and on missions throughout Greenland, and on targeted science missions, from mapping sea ice in marginal ice zones and outlet glaciers such as those surrounding Ross Island or Greenland to quantifying large sub-glacial drainage systems in East Antarctica. Recent years have seen extreme changes in the Arctic. Particularly striking are changes within the Pacific sector of the Arctic Ocean, and especially in the seas north of the Alaskan coast. These areas have experienced record warming, reduced sea ice extent, and loss of ice in areas that had been ice-covered throughout human memory. Even the oldest and thickest ice types have failed to survive through the summer melt period in areas such as the Beaufort Sea and Canada Basin, and fundamental changes in ocean conditions such as earlier phytoplankton blooms may be underway. A basic question that is significant for the entire Earth system is whether these regions have passed a tipping point, such that they are now essentially acting as sub-Arctic seas where ice disappears in summer, or instead whether the changes are transient, with the potential for the ice pack to recover. The answer may depend largely on conditions in areas known as marginal ice zones (MIZ); areas where the "ice-albedo feedback" driven by solar warming is highest, ice melt is extensive, and where human and marine mammal activity is greatest. IcePod measurements will directly address these information gaps through a targeted, intensive payload development campaign that exploits unique capabilities of multiple remote sensing instruments with a C-130.