ARISE is a new NASA airborne science mission. It stands for Arctic Radiation IceBridge
Sea and Ice Experiement. And it's a mission to use to an aircraft
to go to the Arctic and study the affects of global warming
in a region that's really important.
In the Arctic the temperatures are warming about twice as fast as the rest of the planet.
One of the impacts of the warming in the Arctic is the vast amounts
of sea ice are now melting every summer.
We expect that clouds are also changing in the Arctic, but we don't know
whether the clouds are going to offset or enhance the warming
effect that we expect from melting sea ice. HANSEN: One of the biggest
challenges with this new ARISE mission was pulling together
all the mission objectives, the logistics the aircraft
where we're going to deploy to in less than seven months, which is typically unheard of.
We usually have over a year to do all of that stuff, so when I was assigned
to lead the project in March, the idea was, Christy, we need everything pulled together to
support an August deployment. Can you support this, this new
mission. It didn't have a name yet, it didn't have specific science objectives,
it didn't necessarily have an aircraft. So we're using the
Wallops NASA C-130, essentially because it's a platform that
is set up to support experiments. It can take on a lot of different instrumentation
The four engine turboprop plane provides more maneuverablity for a lot
the wide breadth of science objectives that we want to do. Also it's available
to support our science so. We only have seven months, it's an available aircraft.
Can it meet our needs? Yes, it can. So we're going with it.
One of the things I really enjoyed with working on ARISE is this element of cooperation.
I'm really proud of the team. I feel excited to be part of this mission.
And most of all, the entire scientific community out there is really excited about seeing all of our
new data sets for the first time.
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