GMAO Member Lauren Andrews Named Deputy PI for EVS-4 Mission “Snow4Flow”

4.29.2024

NASA recently announced selections for the upcoming Earth Venture Suborbital-4 (EVS-4) program, a series of six airborne missions to study a variety of Earth science fields. These missions will use aircraft-mounted instruments to gather data on their areas of focus, which will be both complimentary of existing satellite data and new, high-resolution data unable to be obtained by existing satellites. The GMAO is proud to have one of its own involved in one of these six studies. Lauren Andrews will be the Deputy PI of the “Snow4Flow” mission; John (Jack) Holt (University of Arizona) is the PI and Joe MacGregor (Goddard’s Cryospheric Sciences Lab) is the second Deputy PI. This mission will seek to better measure, model, and project glacier mass and mass change in Alaska, Svalbard, Arctic Canada, and Southeast Greenland.

“Quantifying the ongoing retreat of glaciers and ice sheets – and projecting their futures – are perennial NASA Earth Science priorities due to their contribution to sea-level rise and influence on water resources, natural hazards, and associated socioeconomic impacts. Our ability to confidently project glacier and ice-sheet mass change is limited by a severe lack of observations that reliably constrain their mass fluxes, both as input (Snow) and output (Flow).” To accomplish the goals of Snow4Flow, airborne measurements of glacier depth and snow accumulation patterns will be used to better constrain glacier flow model boundary conditions and forcing data, including orographic precipitation patterns in alpine environments, ice thickness and subglacial topography. Snow4Flow embeds modeling in each step of an airborne campaign to revolutionize the scientific community’s understanding of precipitation- and flow-driven mass change from Northern Hemisphere glaciers.

In the coming months Snow4Flow, and all EVS-4 missions, will select a science team. The first airborne campaign is expected to start in 2026.

slide graphic from MPS
Operation IceBridge Alaska's De Havilland Otter climbs up Miles Glacier during a survey flight in August 2018. [UAF/Chris Larsen]

The GMAO looks forward to the contributions this and the other five EVS-4 missions will make to Earth sciences and congratulates Lauren Andrews on being named Deputy PI for the Snow4Flow mission.

A description of all six missions involved in this EVS-4 project can be found at the link here: https://science.nasa.gov/earth/nasa-selects-new-aircraft-driven-studies-of-earth-and-climate-change/