First Look
MCMURDO STATION, ANTARCTICA– We’ve completed our second successful science flight to Terra Nova Bay Friday night into Saturday morning. This was a 16.5 hour flight that covered a distance of a bit over 1300 km (800 miles).
The purpose of this mission was to observe the low level winds and temperatures in the atmosphere, with the goal of relating these to the processes happening at the surface of the sea ice and ocean. To help us relate the atmospheric processes to the surface processes we took aerial photographs as we flew over Terra Nova Bay. Seeing the surface state will be very useful as we try to understand the meteorological data we’ve collected.
The flight arrived at Terra Nova Bay around sunset, so we didn’t have much time to take aerial photos before it became dark, but the photos we did get are stunning and raise some interesting questions that we’ll be trying to answer as we analyze the data we’ve collected. One of the big questions is how there was almost no open water despite winds blowing offshore at over 50 mph.
All of the aerial photographs shown here were taken from an altitude of 150 m and each image covers a horizontal distance of approximately 150 meters.
All of the photographs were taken on the first leg of the flight (the leftmost blue line) in the flight path shown above.
We are planning to switch to daytime flights this week, since the days are getting long enough to allow us to launch at first light and fly until dusk and still have 14 or 15 hour missions. Of course the time between sunrise and sunset is just at 12 hours right now, as it is everywhere on Earth on 21 September. What will allow us to fly 14 or 15 hour flights and still take-off and land in daylight is the fact that the length of twilight before sunrise and after sunset is very long here. We’re hoping to get lots more images of the polynya during these daytime flights.