Mission: Umanaq B (priority: high)

This mission is designed (along with Umanaq A) to refly the 2012 Umanaq coast-parallel grid with a pair of interlaced missions. This mission by itself reoccupies a grid spaced at 10 km near the coast, widening to 20 km upstream. The two flights together establish a grid at half this spacing. We also fly a pair of lines over the Disko Island ice cap, and another over the Nuussuaq Peninsula. This flight retains a high priority for 2016 because it continues an intra-annual time series with the spring and fall 2015 campaigns along these lines.

Weather across southern Greenland today was dominated by a frontal system roughly situated along the island's southwestern coast.  Cloudiness associated with this system entirely covered the southern third of Greenland, and the system was forecast to move slowly northward during the day.  This covered all of our baseline-priority flight areas in cloud, but left the Nuussuaq-Umanaq area, and the Geikie Peninsula, clear.  We selected the Umanaq B mission because it was the highest-priority flight of those in the clear areas, and because it, unlike Geikie, can be reflown during the late summer campaign with the Falcon aircraft.

All instruments performed normally today.  The network problem from two days ago recurred this morning during preflight, but we were able to work around the issue successfully and we lost no science data.  The root cause has so far eluded us.

We encountered some cloudiness at the southern ~40 km of the inland lines later in the day, and also some cloudiness over parts of the inland-most line for much of its length.  We were forced to abandon science operations halfway along that final southbound line due to a hydraulic leak and return directly to base at Kangerlussuaq.  Overall, we estimate successful data collection today at 80% of the planned mission.

Data volumes:
ATM: 27 Gb 
FLIR: 3.2 Gb
DMS: 69 Gb 
Ku-Band Radar: 208 Gb
MCoRDS: 1.2 Tb
Snow Radar: 208 Gb
BESST: xx Gb

total data collection time: 5.9 hrs