WALLOPS ISLAND, Va – James Yungel has been flying the same stretch of Greenland since 1993 when scientists started to hear about a trend some were calling “global warming.”
Yungel is the Program Manager for Wallops Island Remote Sensing Team and he says the mission in the early years was to determine whether Greenland’s glaciers were losing ice and snow, or in scientific terms, mass balance.
Yungel says you only have to look at the Jacobshavn, which is Greenland’s largest glacier, to see that the mass balance of the ice is overwhelmingly negative.
“The ice and the front edge of that glacier have moved seven miles,” said Yungel. “You can really see the depression in the ice and that noticeable difference is something we’ve been seeing over the past 20 years.”
Yungel oversees Operation Icebridge, which is an aerial data collecting mission that uses laser technology and other sophisticated instruments to measure snow depth, ice elevation and thickness, surface temperature, bed topography and other characteristics of sea ice, ice sheets and glaciers.
As the world’s leaders continue the debate about what to do concerning climate change in Paris at the U.N. Climate Conference, local scientists like Yungle are hard at work collecting the vital data that will be used in making the decisions about the planet’s future.
“Our system fires between three and 10 thousand (laser) pulses per second,” explained Yungel, “and we fly an eight-hour mission, so that’s one day of work for us. But each deployment we’ll do about 40 missions on the same flight plan.”
That constant repetition and detail helps scientists get the most accurate readings possible.
“It’s very difficult to try and measure sea level rise from an aircraft or a satellite, especially when you factor in tides, and storms and even tankers,” said Yungel, “so we thought rather than try to measure a one millimeter rise in sea levels, that we would be better off going to Greenland and Antartica and measuring the ice there.”
Yet, despite the visible glacier melt around the world, including the U.S., and the corresponding data that supports it, the debate surrounding climate change and sea level rise rages on.
“We are going to need hard facts as time goes on, and that’s what we are doing,” said Yungel. “I believe the evidence has become so overwhelming that this is happening that the argument has become what is causing it, rather than if it’s real.”
Yungel and his Operation Icebridge team have to sift through massive amounts of data that they collect, but they are required to turn that data over for public consumption within six months of collection.
“The facts we find must be available on the Internet to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, CO within six months of collection”, he said. “Anyone can access this data, and we go to great lengths to ensure that it’s accurate and precise, because we are all asking the question of whether or not we have gone too far to fix this.”
A Local Laboratory
A little closer to home, Caroline Massey, the Assistant Director of Management Operations at Wallops, has her focus on the Mid-Atlantic region.
“In order to understand the impact of climate change elements such as sea level rise, extreme weather and degraded coastal ecosystems, we must go where the signal is the strongest, and that is the Mid-Atlantic region,” she said.
Massey calls this region one of the nation’s most dynamic and unique coastlines, and that’s why she has helped to get the Mid-Atlantic Coastal Resilience Institute (MACRI), a multi-state, multi-disciplinary partnership dedicated to integrated climate change research off the ground.
“In this region, we have both protected, undeveloped ecological coastline as well as intense coastal development,” she said. “That makes this the perfect living laboratory that could help us to understand both the human and the natural effects on the shore.”
Massey says one of the issues with scientific research is that it often exists independently and the various studies don’t fit well together.
“The goal of MACRI is to integrate the existing data that there is and find and fill in the gaps in the data,” she said.
Simply put, in all of these independent studies about climate change, there is always a degree of uncertainty, and Massey says those uncertainties can be confusing.
“We want to get to the same resolution using real data rather than just estimates,” she said. “Anyone you talk to will tell you with great certainty that there is sea level rise and that storms are bigger and longer and more powerful. As scientists, we always want to be grounded in facts, but we want to flip the research paradigm and get to the point where climate change is accepted, so we can get to the next step of trying to fix it for future generations.”