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NASA Pilots Get Dunked

NASA pilot Wayne Ringelberg, right, prepares to be dunked by Federal Aviation Administration Aviation Physiology and post-crash survival instructor Roger Storey, left, for helicopter egress training on April 12, 2023, at the FAA Civil Aerospace Medical Institute in Oklahoma. Credits: FAA Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center/Laura Shepherd-Madsen

What’s it like to escape from an aircraft underwater? NASA research pilots Wayne Ringelberg, and Scott Howe recently found out when they completed pilot dunker training at the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center Civil Aerospace Medical Institute in Oklahoma. This training certifies the pilots to fly helicopters over bodies of water for upcoming automated systems flight testing for NASA’s Advanced Air Mobility research with Sikorsky and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency).

Elation Through Filtration: An Oceanographer’s Sensations at Sea

Scenes from CTD water collection party. Courtesy of Jessica Caggiano and Jacob Wenegrat.

Being a biological oceanographer on a physical oceanographic voyage has highlighted a key distinction between the two disciplines. Physical oceanographers rely on sensing – deploying instrumentation that measures properties of the water: temperature, velocity, oxygen, etc. Those data are sent back to laptops allowing for near instantaneous analysis. The day-to-day work of biological oceanography, on the other hand, may be a science best described by filtering – a task that is intertwined with most measurements in our field. We collect water and remove the particles or organisms we want to study. The finest filter might have holes that let only the tiniest particles through, while the largest filter could be something like a large net, where even fish can slip through its mesh.

In Dust and Clouds Over Africa, Scientists Find Clues to How Hurricanes Form

When the dust that wafts off the Sahel and Sahara regions of Africa mixes with tropical clouds, it creates what’s known as a rainy “disturbance” in the eastern Atlantic. These disturbances are hurricanes in their youngest form, and as they travel across the ocean, they can either dissipate or grow into powerful storms.

To study these infant storms, a group of NASA scientists in September 2022 spent a month flying off the northwestern coast of Africa aboard NASA’s DC-8 research plane.  Each day, the team took off from Cabo Verde, an island nation off the west coast of Africa, logging roughly 100 hours altogether. The mission, known as the Convective Processes Experiment – Cabo Verde (CPEX-CV) released its data publicly on April 1.

A look at NASA’s new mission to explore the Earth’s oceans

​Scientists at NASA are on a mission to study the surface of the Earth's oceans to observe how eddies, whirlpools and currents interact with the atmosphere and shape the Earth’s climate. NBC’s Jacob Soboroff reports for TODAY.

On the Edge: NASA’s Last S-MODE Mission Studies the Ocean’s Surface

Kelly Luis, a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, uses a handheld instrument called the Spectral Evolution to measure water color during the Sub-Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics Experiment (S-MODE) mission. Image Credit: NASA/Avery Snyder

NASA has taken to the seas and skies to study the unique environment at the ocean’s surface, where marine ecosystems intersect with our planet's complex atmosphere. On April 7, 2023, scientists participating in the Sub-Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics Experiment (S-MODE) embarked on the RV Sally Ride from San Diego on the last of three field expeditions to understand the ocean’s role in the Earth’s changing climate. They will be at sea for about a month until returning to San Diego on May 4, and they will operate for most of that period in tandem with an accompanying airborne campaign.

Dr. Brenna Biggs Presents “Wave” Hello to NASA S-MODE: A Study of Sub-Mesoscale Ocean Processes

Scientists on the RV Sally Ride are interviewed

Dr. Brenna Biggs hosted a panel of S-MODE scientists at an Earth Day event at the Chabot Space and Science Center for K-12 students on April 22, 2023.

NASA Leaders View Climate Science, Wildfire Innovations at NASA Ames

Florian Schwandner (left), director of the Earth Sciences Division at NASA’s Ames Research Center, describes to U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo the use of autonomous uncrewed aircraft to carry cameras and sensors for monitoring of environmental events such as wildfires or volcanic activity. Credits: NASA/Dominic Hart

NASA is working to understand climate change and build resilience to its risks, such as the increasing threat of wildfire, for the nation and the world. On April 13, the agency’s top leadership visited NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley to learn about the center’s climate science and innovations in aeronautics that will help people everywhere face these challenges.

Scientists are flying into snowstorms to explore winter weather mysteries

The P-3 research plane leaving its hangar at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Patrick Black/NASA

High up in some ice-filled clouds, sitting inside an airplane loaded with science instruments, Christian Nairy looked at pictures flashing on his computer screen. This high-altitude slideshow is displaying real-time images of cloud particles being sampled by a device out on the plane's wing — and some of the ice crystals looked like perfect little snowflakes.

NASA Armstrong Showcases Women in Aviation

Women served as the first computers for NASA Armstrong as shown in this photo from 1949. Hired due to their math degrees or teaching backgrounds, they took raw data from various aircraft manually. They began with film traces, and generated pages and pages of numbers, then graphed them for the engineers to use. Over the next 15 years, they were gradually replaced with electronic computers. Credits: NASA Armstrong

NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center has a long history with employing women in aviation careers and empowering these women to reach for the sky, although it was not always this way. Today, several of the key NASA aeronautics projects are led by females.

BioSCape ARSET Webinar - Biodiversity Applications for Airborne Imaging Systems

We are thrilled to announce that registration for NASA's Applied Remote Sensing Training Program (ARSET) is now live! This course is designed to help prepare the community to use BioSCape's airborne data sets. The course is called "Biodiversity Applications for Airborne Imaging Systems" and is a webinar run over four sessions between 27th March and 5th April. Please register through the link above.

A Nervous Flier’s Guide to Riding the Snowy Skies

The pilots navigate the plane along the flight path as the sun begins to set for the day. Credit: Erica McNamee

I grew up flying in planes. I’m comfortable in them. But there’s one part of flying I’ve never gotten used to: turbulence. It’s common on commercial flights, so over the years I’ve learned a few tips and tricks on how to stay calm when my mind seems to take off at a sprint.

How a Cold War spy plane went from watching the Soviets to watching the weather for NASA

NASA operates two Airborne Science ER-2 aircraft for a wide variety of environmental science, atmospheric sampling, and satellite data verification missions. (Carla Thomas/NASA).

Located just north of Atlanta, Georgia, Dobbins Air Reserve Base is usually home to C-130 transport planes. But for the next few weeks, the base will host an unusual guest: a white-painted jet that can fly for more than half a day at the edge of space.

NASA’s C-20A deploys to Hawaii Following Volcanic Eruption

A team of pilots, operations engineers, instrument scientists and maintenance crews deployed to Kona, Hawaii in December in support of NASA’s C-20A rapid response mission to map lava flows of the Mauna Loa volcanic eruption.

Following the eruption of the world’s largest active volcano, Mauna Loa, NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center deployed its C-20A aircraft to Kona, Hawaii, to gather images and data of the active lava flows for submission to the United States Geological Survey (USGS) by a team of scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Cloudy with a Chance for Whirlpools: Ocean Models Guide NASA’s S-MODE Mission

A photo of Joseph. Credit: Courtesy of Joseph D’Addezio

NASA’s S-MODE mission faces quite the challenge: robustly observe, for the first time, ocean features spanning up to about 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) across. Currently, the oceanographic community routinely observes and studies very large ocean features, primarily through space-based instrumentation. These include strong currents such as the Gulf Stream that runs from Florida along the East Coast of the United States all the way to western Europe. Large vortexes are also observed – these being the cyclones and anticyclones you may have seen on your evening weather forecasts.

Where No Map Leads: Reflections from NASA’s S-MODE Mission

Dolphins surfacing at a submesoscale front on a calm, foggy day – photo taken off of the stern of the Bold Horizon. Credit: Gwen Marechal

It’s like stumbling through a thick forest and breaking out into a glade. A quiet has settled on this piece of sea as the waves calm. You can’t make a good map to get to this place. In the ocean, these glades are always moving, twisting, being born into life by the collision of great currents, then breaking apart, fracturing and sinking beneath the waves. The cold water brought from below by the coastal winds creates a fog that lies heavy on the sea surface, creating this small, calm spot.

Places like this can be found by things with nowhere else to go. Throw something off the side of a boat and it will likely end up somewhere like here. We’re at a convergence zone that attracts floating debris of all sizes. In particular, it attracts minuscule plankton, along with all the things that eat them and all the things that eat those things and so on and so on. All of it dragged hereby the undulating ocean.

Finding Nature at Sea During NASA’s S-MODE Field Campaign

A black-footed albatross shows off its sleek wings over the wake of our ship. Credit: Alex Kinsella.

My favorite part of being at sea is the opportunity to see unique parts of the natural world that aren’t accessible from land. My colleagues have done a fantastic job in their blog posts explaining the science that we’ve been conducting during S-MODE, so I want to take this opportunity to describe some of the sights that those of us on the Bold Horizon have been able to enjoy during our field work: birds, mammals, weather, and stars.

A First Cruise Experience with NASA’s S-MODE Field Campaign

Mackenzie (left) and Avery Snyder (right) getting ready to deploy a mixed layer float. Credit: Alex Kinsella

I had been patiently waiting and dreaming about this research cruise for months. Yet a few days before traveling from Connecticut to Oregon for ship mobilization, I couldn’t shake a feeling of denial – like I couldn’t believe I was really going to be out in the Pacific Ocean on a research vessel for an entire month.

I am participating in NASA’s Sub-Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics Experiment (S-MODE) as part of the science party aboard the research vessel Bold Horizon. The focus of this experiment is to sample ocean fronts that are a few miles in size to study their dynamics and effects on vertical transport. The ocean fronts are sampled using aircraft, ship surveying, and autonomous platforms with names such as wave gliders, sea gliders, Saildrones, floats, and drifters. So being aboard the ship is just one piece of this complex research experiment.

Life at Sea: A “First-Timer” Chronicles NASA’s S-MODE Field Campaign

First sunset off the Bold Horizon after many cloudy days!

Going to sea for the first time as part of NASA’s S-MODE mission has been an experience like no other. You establish a new normal on the boat and quickly fall into new routines. Perceptions of time even change! I joked with some people on the boat that time is but a label on our samples. Perhaps that’s a bit dramatic, but normal perceptions of time do not apply at sea –especially if you start your day at 2 pm and finish at 2 am.

Student of the Sea: Learning the Ropes Aboard NASA’s S-MODE Mission

Science team on board the R/V Bold Horizon for the second deployment of the S-MODE mission (10/07/2022). Credit: Erin Czech.

NASA’s S-MODE mission was designed to measure and understand the complex oceanic features classified as “submesoscale,” i.e., features spanning up to 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) across. Such fine filaments and sharp density fronts in the ocean are responsible for fast and unpredictable changes in velocity, temperature, salinity, and even among small organisms called plankton in the surface layer of the ocean. A myriad of autonomous instruments, airborne sensors, and a fully equipped ship are part of the robust methods of measuring submesoscale dynamics in the California Current region.

NASA’s S-MODE Field Campaign Deploys to the Pacific Ocean

Autonomous wave gliders are seen being prepared for deployment on the deck of the research vessel Oceanus during the pilot campaign for NASA’s Sub-Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics Experiment (S-MODE) in the Pacific Ocean off the U.S. West Coast. Credits: Ben Hodges / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)

When the research vessel Bold Horizon sailed from Newport, Oregon, in early October, it joined a small armada of planes, drones, and other high-tech craft chasing the ocean’s shapeshifting physics. NASA’s Sub-Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics Experiment (S-MODE) is converging on a patch of sea 110 nautical miles off the coast of San Francisco. Over the course of 28 days, the team will deploy a new generation of tools to observe whirlpools, currents, and other dynamics at the air-sea boundary. The goal: to understand how these dynamics drive the give-and-take of nutrients and energy between the ocean and atmosphere and, ultimately, help shape Earth’s climate.

Alaska’s Newest Lakes Are Belching Methane

Big Trail Lake is one of Alaska’s newest lakes and one of the largest methane emission hotspots in the Arctic. Credit: NASA / Katie Jepson

“This lake wasn’t here 50 years ago.” Katey Walter Anthony, an ecologist at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, dips her paddle into the water as her kayak glides across the lake. “Years ago, the ground was about three meters taller and it was a spruce forest,” she says. Big Trail Lake is a thermokarst lake, which means it formed due to permafrost thaw. Permafrost is ground that stays frozen year round; the permafrost in interior Alaska also has massive wedges of actual ice locked within the frozen ground. When that ice melts, the ground surface collapses and forms a sinkhole that can fill with water. Thus, a thermokarst lake is born.

IMPACTS Data User Workshop - 26-27 October 2022

We are currently planning our third IMPACTS Data User Workshop that will be held virtually on 26-27 October 2022 from 12:00-2:30 ET. These open data workshops enable our IMPACTS team to present important information to you (our potential IMPACTS data users) to help with your analysis of the data. For more information and to register, please click in the link below.

Walking Back in Time to Learn About the Future of Permafrost

Scientists and pilots with NASA’s ABoVE campaign got to tour the U.S. Army CRREL’s permafrost tunnel during their August 2022 field campaign in Fairbanks, Alaska. Credit: Sofie Bates / NASA

There’s a freezer door in the mountainside outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. Tom Douglas opens it and we step inside, breathing in cold air and musky dust as we start to walk back through time. This isn’t fantasy. It’s the Permafrost Tunnel run by the U.S. Army’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Alaska, where Douglas is a Senior Scientist. Recently, Douglas led a group of scientists and pilots with NASA’s Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) on a tour through the Tunnel to learn about permafrost. Permafrost is any soil, ice, or organic matter like plant material or bone that has stayed frozen year-round for at least two years. The tunnel was initially excavated in the 1960s and has been expanded since 2011. Now, the Permafrost Tunnel has almost 500 meters of excavation. “There’s just nowhere else on Earth that has this type of access to permafrost,” said Douglas.

Measuring Methane in the Everglades

The field campaign—called Blue Carbon Prototype Products for Mangrove Methane and Carbon Dioxide Fluxes (BLUEFLUX)—is designed to measure the methane and carbon dioxide changes at key wetlands around the Caribbean. Field teams took samples from the ground, while NASA’s Carbon Airborne Flux Experiment (CARAFE) aircraft measured methane emissions from the same locations from above. The broader goal of the campaign is to link ground and aerial data with satellite observations using machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms in order to produce a daily methane flux dataset for the Caribbean region.

SARP Ozone Sondes Coincide with SAGE III/ISS Measurements

SARP students carry an ozone sonde balloon to launch at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California.

A NASA student research program recently took to the stratosphere to make ozone measurements that coincided with events from the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment (SAGE) III on the International Space Station (ISS), an instrument developed at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

Toward Greater Diversity in Earth Sciences: NASA’s Student Airborne Science Activation Program

Student researchers participating in the first year of NASA’s Student Airborne Science Activation (SaSa) program pose in front of the agency’s P-3 aircraft, July 9, 2022, at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. Participants flew aboard the P-3 to collect Earth science data for their research. SaSa aims to increase diversity in the geosciences by providing students from minority-serving institutions with research experience and professional support. Pictured here are SaSa participants

Understanding Earth and the complex influences on our planet’s climate are some of the biggest challenges of our times, and we need all the help we can get to tackle them. But, in the last 40 years, the minority representation in geosciences – meaning Earth, atmosphere, and ocean sciences – has remained relatively low despite its increase in proportion of the U.S. population. This summer, in an effort to address that, a new NASA program welcomed its first class of students.

NASA Flies Students on DC-8 to Study Air Quality

NASA flight crew, SARP students and mentors pose in front of the DC-8 on June 21, 2022.

A group of university students and mentors flew aboard NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center’s DC-8 aircraft to study air quality as part of NASA’s Student Airborne Research Program (SARP).

NASA Aircraft Conducting Atmospheric Studies Over DC to Baltimore

The P-3 aircraft is fueled on NASA's Wallops Flight Facility main base runway in Virginia.

A NASA aircraft will fly over the I-95 corridor from Washington to Baltimore and Hampton, Virginia, in support of an atmospheric campaign in the mid-Atlantic region between July 5 and 16, 2022.

NASA Airborne Science Mission Engages with Students in Bermuda

Students from Victor Scott Primary in Bermuda sit at the hangar door and look across the runway at one of the ACTIVATE aircraft.

A NASA airborne science mission conducting research flights over the Atlantic Ocean held an outreach event June 9 during a three-week deployment to Bermuda.

NASA’s ER-2 No. 806 Returns to Flight

NASA's ER-2 No. 806 returns to flying high-altitude on April 7, 2022, after three years of heavy maintenance. NASA Armstrong operates two ER-2 aircraft to collect information about Earth resources, celestial observations, atmospheric chemistry and dynamics, and oceanic processes.

NASA’s ER-2 high-altitude aircraft No. 806 returned to flight after three years of significant modifications and heavy maintenance.