The aim of this large-scale international campaign is to record sea-ice thickness and conditions of the ice to validate ESA’s CryoSat mission. The campaign also extended to surveying land ice.
A range of sensors installed on the different aircraft was used to gather complementary information as well as measurements collected from the surface of the ice.
The airborne instruments included laser scanners to map the height of the ice, an ice-thickness sensor called EM-Bird along with ESA’s sophisticated radar altimeter called ASIRAS and NASA’s snow and Ku-band radars, which mimic CryoSat’s measurements but at a higher resolution.
- To assess and quantify uncertainty in the CryoSat-2 measurements of sea ice thickness and land ice thickness change.