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Kurtz: MOSAiC is a yearlong drifting expedition in the Arctic.

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As part of MOSAiC, it’s a suite of in situ,

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airborne data, all kinds of data, taken, centered around

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this ship. And one of the things that’s onboard is a helicopter,

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and so the helicopter is equipped with a laser altimeter

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and a camera, which is perfect for validating ICESat-2.

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We looked at the ICESat-2 orbit tracks, and we realized that MOSAiC had drifted

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very close to where ICESat-2 was going to pass over.

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So we planned an underflight directly under where ICESat-2 was

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measuring. What we’re seeing in this cloud of photons

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from ICESat-2 is largely the flatness and

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uniformity of the sea ice cover, but what you really see that stands out

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are these spikes, these ridges. And so these are these massive

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6-feet. or even higher. ridges that are

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just massive blocks of ice piled up. And so those really stand out

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in the photon cloud. And so we got a lot of very good validation

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data that we normally wouldn’t this time of year because of

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numerous cancellations, for instance, the major airborne component of MOSAiC

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had been cancelled because of world events. And so now with the

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helicopter that was on board we were able to collect valuable validation data.

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[helicopter rotors]
What’s also important about this dataset from MOSAiC is the

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collaborative nature. MOSAiC involves over 20 nations, and so

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now people from all those different nations are able to take

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this data that we collected and compared it in an independent way to what ICESat-2 is measuring.

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