Addendum to Site Assessment and Feasibility of a New Operations Base on the Greenland Ice Sheet: Addendum to Preliminary Report.

摘要

The New York Air National Guard (NYANG) 109th Airlift Wing training facility located at Raven in southwest Greenland experienced surface crevassing during the 2012 extreme Greenland melt event, which limited the use of the runway. Because of subsequent interest in relocating the runway, our study analyzed the runway s climatic, physical, and logistical factors, expanding on Site Assessment and Feasibility of a New Operations Base on the Greenland Ice Sheet by Burzynski et al. (2013). Their report identified a primary target region for relocating the runway based on stakeholder criteria and climatic data collected from across Greenland. We improved on this investigation by replacing the proxy (e.g., elevation) previously used for melt with newly released satellite estimates of melt. These new data used changes in microwave emissions from the surface and near surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet to estimate melt days across Greenland. By applying the Burzynski et al. (2013) criteria to the new melt data, we quantified melt days/year over the past 35 years. This improves the selection criteria for an appropriate relocation zone for the Raven runway, and the ArcGIS framework developed by this project provides the ability to incorporate future stakeholder needs into the site-selection analysis.