OIB: NASA and ESA in an Arctic Alliance

Studinger: NASA's Operation IceBridge is a six-year campaign that monitors the sea ice and the land ice over the Arctic and the Antarctic.Over the past couple of weeks we have collected a tremendous data set over the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean that will allow us to calibrate the European Space Agency's Cryosat 2 satellitee. And we were able to do this because we were pooling resources between ESA's Cryovex campaign and NASA's Operation IceBridge. And this joint data set will allow us to build a joint time series of measurements in the Arctic Ocean This was the second year in a row that we have collected data on the ground in the air, and from satellite measurements at the same time, and this data set will help us greatly to understand the data and calibrate the data that are being collected by satellites from space. The data sets that we are collecting will also help develop better techniques for ICESat2 and together with all these satellite missions we hope to build a very long time series, beginning with ICESat one, covering over IceBridge, Cryosat 2, and leading up to ICESat 2 in the future. [wind sounds]