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Smith: Ok, our Photon Phriday

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for this week is measurements over ice, but it’s not ice

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that’s at the poles. It’s not from Greenland or from Antarctica.

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It’s from western Washington, where I live. We’re going from

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close to the Oregon border, where we hit Mount Adams, up to the

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northwest, where we hit Mount Baker. And these are two of the

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Cascade volcanoes. They’re not the two biggest volcanoes, but they each have

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good sized glaciers on them. If you look closely at the profiles,

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you can see that the signal gets bright as you go over the tops of

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the glaciers. And that’s probably because there was still some snow left

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over right up at the top. This is exciting because

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the glaciers in Washington state are changing very quickly. We’ve had

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a lot of fairly warm summers and winters

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that have not been as snowy as we might expect. It’s been, to some extent, raining

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instead of snowing. So the glaciers are shrinking quite quickly.

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We’ve got a measurement early in the mission that hit both

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of these mountains. We can hope to hit it again, maybe in a couple of

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years, and we’ll have elevation change measurements for both glaciers.
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