About the 2011 North Pole Web Cams
The two 2011 web cams were deployed on an ice floe drifting southward from the North Pole in April 2011. In some of the earlier photos you will see members of the North Pole deployment team in action. The Arctic lost sea ice very rapidly in the first half of July. Ice loss slowed in late July-early August, but resumed again later in August.
The stand holding Web cam 1 tilted in the soft snow and melt ponds on July 9, 2011, but did not fall over completely, as you can see in the images. No images were received from Web Cam 1 from Sept 15-21, 2011 due to a temporary lapse in the iridium phone card subscription for the camera, however, this web cam did continue to transmit until winter darkness descended on the North Pole. Web cam 2 fell over on July 23 in the melted snow and ice, after which it viewed only the sky.
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| Deployment Photo (April 11, 2011) |
Deployment Photo (April 13, 2011) |
Latest viewable image from Camera 1: Oct 1, 2011 | Last good image from Camera 2: Jul 23, 2011 |  |
Web Cam animations:
- Watch the rapid Arctic sea ice melt in the YouTube video & Icebreaker Healy approaching N. Pole Aug-Sep 2011.
- More 2011 Arctic sea ice animations are available from web cams 1, 2 (.mov files)
- Icebreaker USCG Healy approaching the North Pole in Aug-Sep, 2011: Track1, Track2 (.mov)
More data and information:
- Weather data:
- Web Cam 1: Weather data from IABP PAWS buoy deployed with WebCam#1 - from the North Pole Environmental Observatory.
- Web Cam 2: Atmospheric data and ocean data from the POPS-12 buoy deployed with WebCam#2 - from the North Pole Environmental Observatory.
- Drift Track data for 2011 Web Cam #1 and #2 from the North Pole Environmental Observatory
- Note: the NPEO web cam drift map is continuously updated and will always reflect the most recent web cam deployments
- Full set of images and animations of the images are available from the North Pole Web Cam home page.
- Summer sea ice transition from 2002 - present
- a discussion of times of the onset of melt, melt pond coverage, and onset of freeze-up revealed by the North Pole Web Cams
- General Information about the North Pole Images
- more information about the web cams, what you see in the images, and the environment at the North Pole
- About the USDC Healy images & animations
- Track2 started from Aug. 11,2011.
- USCG HEALY will spend seven months underway in the Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Ocean for four separate science missions during its deployment. During the first mission, the crew of the HEALY will be working with researchers from NASA to collect and study water and ice samples, looking largely to learn more about the refractive properties of sunlight in the Arctic environment. The second mission will be the HEALY’s fourth year of collaboration with the Canadian Coast Guard Icebreaker LOUIS S ST-LAURENT to map the floor of the Arctic Ocean, helping to create a more complete picture of the topographical features of the Arctic seafloor. The third mission will include deploying several types of hydrographic moorings, as well as recovering hydrographic moorings deployed on earlier missions, and the fourth mission will be a biology-based mission, studying the behavior of copepods in the winter months.
- The hourly pictures from the aloft con are archived at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and that is where we downloaded images for the animations. There is also a trackline at IceFloe. Go to this website http://www.uscg.mil/pacarea/cgcHealy/aws11/ to find all the details/
- About the Iridium phone card
- This year, we weren't able to get the DITCO cards to work with the Iridium modems, so we had to use commercial cards. They were so much more expensive that we couldn't buy a whole season's worth of time but were having to recharge the cards every couple of months. There was a lapse and no images were received from Sept 15-21, 2011.
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• Web cam Home and Acknowledgments |
| • Daylight and Darkness at the North Pole | |
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The North Pole Web Cam is part of the North Pole Environmental Observatory, a joint National Science Foundation-sponsored effort by the Polar Science Center, / APL / UW, the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory / NOAA, the Japan Marine Science and Technology Center, Oregon State University, and Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory. |  |
