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Code 614.1 Mission
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The cryosphere is the component of the Earth System that contains water in its frozen state. This includes glaciers, snow, lake ice, sea ice, ice caps, ice sheets and permafrost. While these elements of the cryosphere exist at many locations on Earth, they are in greatest abundance in the polar regions. The mission of the Cryospheric Sciences Branch (CSB) is to increase our understanding of the ice cover and its connection to the rest of the climate systems.
History and projections of global climate suggest that the high-latitude ice-covered regions of the Earth, particularly the Arctic, have high sensitivity to climate change. Among the reasons for this sensitivity is the positive albedo feedback associated with the warming/cooling and melting/formation of snow and ice. Other factors include the changes in thermohaline circulation and energy exchanges associated with the formation and melting of sea ice. Consequently, an understanding of the Earth's ice cover and its connections to the rest of the climate systems, is essential to understanding the past, present, and future behavior of the Earth system as a whole.
The Broad Goals of the Cryospheric Sciences Branch
• Measuring and understanding the mass balance of land ice, and its implications for sea level rise,
• Monitoring and understanding important cryospheric processes, such as changes in sea ice and snow cover and their relationships with other parts of the climate system,
• Improving the representation of cryospheric processes in climate models.
Calendar: This Month's Events
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There are currently no entries for July 2009 |
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Related Projects & Web Sites
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Greenland Summit Blog
This research is taking place at Summit Station, Greenland from November 2008 to mid-February 2009. Summit is an National Science Foundation (NSF) supported station on the Greenland Ice Sheet that houses around 40 scientist and staff in the summer months and 4 in the winter. The web address for the station, that includes a webcam link, is www.summitcamp.org. This station is located where the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) ice core was taken. |
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A Tour of the Cryosphere
The cryosphere consists of those parts of the Earth's surface where water is found in solid form, including areas of snow, sea ice, glaciers, permafrost, ice sheets, and icebergs. In these regions, surface temperatures remain below freezing for a portion of each year. Since ice and snow exist relatively close to their melting point, they frequently change from solid to liquid and back again due to fluctuations in surface temperature. Although direct measurements of the cryosphere can be difficult to obtain due to the remote locations of many of these areas, using satellite observations scientists monitor changes in the global and regional climate by observing how regions of the Earth's cryosphere shrink and expand. |
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ICESat
ICESat (Ice, Cloud,and land Elevation Satellite) is the benchmark Earth Observing System mission for measuring ice sheet mass balance, cloud and aerosol heights, as well as land topography and vegetation characteristics. The ICESat mission will provide multi-year elevation data needed to determine ice sheet mass balance as well as cloud property information, especially for stratospheric clouds common over polar areas. It will also provide topography and vegetation data around the globe, in addition to the polar-specific coverage over the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. |
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Aqua Project Science
Aqua, Latin for water, is a NASA Earth Science satellite mission named for the large amount of information that the mission is collecting about the Earth's water cycle, including evaporation from the oceans, water vapor in the atmosphere, clouds, precipitation, soil moisture, sea ice, land ice, and snow cover on the land and ice. Additional variables also being measured by Aqua include radiative energy fluxes, aerosols, vegetation cover on the land, phytoplankton and dissolved organic matter in the oceans, and air, land, and water temperatures. |
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