Mission: East-Central Bed Gap IS-2

This mission was designed with two goals in mind. First, it and the Thule-based West-Central Bed Gap 01 flight are designed to address the largest gaps in knowledge of the bedrock geometry still existing in Greenland. This flight does so along carefully-selected segments of two master grid lines and three relatively low-latency ICESat-2 tracks. In addition, this flight addresses the onset region of the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS) with a repeat of a 1997 line on its eastern margin, a new line along its centerline, and a repeat of a 1994 crossing line.  These latter lines were designed in conjunction with others from several Thule-based missions.  Thus, when combined with the North-Central Gap 01 IS-2 (flown 2019-04-16), Northeast Glaciers 02 (flown 2019-04-18) and Zacharaie-79N (flown 2019-04-05) missions, this almost certainly constitutes the most comprehensive set of measurements of the entire length of the NEGIS Operation IceBridge has ever collected.

A powerful low pressure system south of Greenland's Cape Farewell, along with associated frontal systems, socked in most of the southern third of Greenland today, and appears likely to further limit our options for the remainder of this final week of the spring campaign.  Although we could have flown a higher-priority mission on the central west coast today, the weather forecast models led us to believe that those areas may remain accessible tomorrow and possibly thereafter, while east and central Greenland would likely be clouded.  We are currently not optimistic about further chances for conducting science flights in southeast Greenland this season.  For today's flight we enjoyed almost entirely clear skies, with just a few stretches of thin fog near the ice divide.  We lost a few minutes of laser data, at most, due to the fog.

Headwall SWIR did not operate today, but otherwise all instruments worked well. ATM estimates 99% altimetry data recovery.  We performed a ramp pass at 1200' prior to landing.
 
IceSat-2 Tracks (+/- indicates OIB surveyed after/before IceSat-2)
            0505   +12 days
            0444   +16 days
            0490   +13 days
No lower-latency IceSat-2 substitutions were performed today, because the tracks above were specifically selected to fill gaps in bedrock knowledge.
 
Data volumes:
ATM: 131 Gb
CAMBOT: 169 Gb
FLIR: 16 Gb
KT19: 11 Mb
MCoRDS: 2.229 Tb
Narrow Swath ATM: 175 Gb green
Narrow Swath ATM: 135 Gb IR
VNIR 62 Gb
Snow Radar: 1.495 Tb

total data collection time: 7.7 hrs