NASA Begins to Study The Impact of Climate Change to the Arctic Ecosystem

After finishing the scientific flights to observe Arctic ice observation, NASA continues its study on the Earth's pole. This time the federal space agency run a series of flight to analyze the impact of climate change on the ecosystem in Arctic.

According to NASA, the observation is conducted to advance the ability to monitor Arctic climate change and its impact on the boreal ecosystems. The series of scientific flights will fly over Alaska and northwest Canada in a scientific mission named Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment, or ABoVE.

The ABoVE project is led by the director of the NASA’s Carbon Cycle & Ecosystems Office, Peter Griffith who acts as the project manager that study the Arctic climate change. Griffith is also the chief support scientist with the NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, that in charge of the ABoVE. The scientific flight is a part of a 10-year project that observes the Arctic, according to the report from CBC News.

“We’re starting to address some of the big questions about the climate system," Griffith said about the experiment that analyze the Arctic climate change. “The airborne campaign provides the scientific connection between the observations on the ground and the observations from space.”

The ABoVE project will deploy nine scientific planes, which gather the data on the Arctic climate change and its impact on the ecosystem. The planes will fly from three NASA airbase in Fairbanks, Alaska, and Yellowknife, Canada. The planes are equipped with important instruments to collect the data.

Some of those instruments are the instrument to study the soils, the Airborne Microwave Observatory of Subcanopy and Subsurface (AirMOSS) instrument and the Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR). Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS-NG) to gather vegetation health data, also the Atmospheric Carbon (ATM-C) to measure the three carbon gases, carbon dioxide, methane and carbon monoxide in the air. Watch the report of the last Arctic observation from NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre below: