NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Operation IceBridge, NASA’s airborne survey of changes in polar ice, is closing in on the end of its eighth consecutive Antarctic deployment, and will likely tie its 2012 campaign record for the most research flights carried out during a single Antarctic season.

Two new studies by researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine (UCI), detect the fastest ongoing rates of glacier retreat ever observed in West Antarctica and offer an unprecedented direct view of intense ice melting from the floating undersides of glaciers. The results highlight how the interaction between ocean conditions and the bedrock beneath a glacier can influence the glacier's evolution, with implications for understanding future ice loss from Antarctica and global sea level rise.

NASA’s Global Hawk aircraft was deployed to Florida from Armstrong Flight Research Center at Edwards, CA. on Oct. 6 to monitor and take scientific measurements of Hurricane Matthew.  The unmanned Global Hawk will gather scientific data in support of NOAA’s Sensing Hazards with Operational Unmanned Technology (SHOUT) mission.

A NASA airborne mission designed to transform our understanding of Earth's valuable and ecologically sensitive coral reefs has set up shop in Australia for a two-month investigation of the Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest reef ecosystem.

NOAA’s National Weather Service National Hurricane Center used real-time weather data from the NASA Global Hawk unmanned aircraft to upgrade a tropical storm to a hurricane in the early morning hours Thursday.
 

In an extensive airborne survey, a NASA-led team has analyzed a previously identified "hot spot" of methane emissions in the Four Corners region of the United States, quantifying both its overall magnitude and the magnitudes of its sources. The study finds that just 10 percent of the individual methane sources are contributing half of the emissions.

The Atmospheric Tomography, or ATom, mission is the first to survey the atmosphere over the oceans. Scientists aboard NASA's DC-8 flying laboratory will journey from the North Pole south over the Pacific Ocean to New Zealand and then across to the tip of South America and north up the Atlantic Ocean to Greenland. ATom will discover how much pollution survives to the most remote corners of the earth and assess how the environment has changed as a result.

A new map created with measurements from an airborne instrument developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, reveals the devastating effect of California’s ongoing drought on Sierra Nevada conifer forests.

On Friday June 3, 2016, the Oceans Melting Greenland mission had its first successful test of the system for dropping ocean probes from the Gulfstream-III aircraft into the ocean. The team dropped a single probe into the Gulf of Mexico about 100 miles offshore of Houston as a T-38 chase aircraft monitored. Learn more about OMG and #EarthExpeditions: http://www.nasa.gov/earthexpeditions

NASA's upcoming Coral Reef Airborne Laboratory (CORAL) field experiment will observe entire reef ecosystems in more of the world's reef area – hundreds of times more -- than has ever been observed before.

NAAMES, or the North Atlantic Aerosols and Marine Ecosystems Study, is a five-year NASA-funded study that aims to better define the relationship between the ocean and the atmosphere. NAAMES is the first NASA Earth Venture-Suborbital mission focused on studying the coupled ocean ecosystem and atmosphere using ships and aircraft simultaneously.

Operation IceBridge, NASA’s airborne survey of polar ice, completed its first Greenland research flight of 2016 on April 19, kicking off its eighth spring Arctic campaign. This year’s science flights over Arctic sea and land ice will continue until May 21.

NASA is sending scientists around the world in 2016 – from the edge of the Greenland ice sheet to the coral reefs of the South Pacific – to delve into challenging questions about how our planet is changing and what impacts humans are having on it.

The new NASA airborne mission Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) will pave the way for improved estimates of sea level rise by addressing the question: To what extent is the ocean melting Greenland’s ice from below? The mission will observe changing water temperatures and glaciers that reach the ocean around Greenland from 2015 to 2020. The OMG data set will complement earlier and ongoing observations of Greenland's melting ice sheet by satellite sensors such as the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), which gives a precise measurement of the loss of mass from Greenland, and other airborne programs including NASA's Operation IceBridge, which measures bedrock topography and the depth of the overlying snow and ice.