Why there’s a Nasa jet parked on Yellowknife Airport’s tarmac

With “United States of America” emblazoned on the fuselage and “Nasa” on the tail, the latest arrival at Yellowknife Airport catches the eye.

The Gulfstream III jet carries with it a seasonal migration of Nasa scientists working on a decade-long project to better understand how the northern landscape is changing.

The project is the Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment, cutely abbreviated to Above, and it uses a radar pod mounted beneath the jet to gather data about the land.

Each summer, the team flies the jet across about 15 predetermined paths over the vast spread of the Northwest Territories, exactly copying paths it has flown in previous years.

All of the data can then be used to see how the landscape is being altered by phenomena like permafrost and wildfires.

To learn more about the project, the work it’s doing and how the NWT might be able to use the results, listen to our interview with Chip Miller – a scientist from Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who helps lead Above – on the Cabin Talks podcast.

Get the podcast for Apple, Spotify and other platforms here.

You can also head to an open house being held by Nasa at 3:30pm on Thursday, August 15. Head to the Shell Aviation doors of the Canadian North building at 155 Bristol Avenue, near the main airport terminal.

What Above tries to offer

This summer is the Above team’s first opportunity to capture data that shows the impact of last year’s record wildfire season.

“We started out looking at the impact of the large fires that happened in 2014 and how the system was recovering from those,” said Miller. “We were seeing accelerated degradation of permafrost but, in many places, we were seeing the normal succession of vegetation that had been burned and then slowly the deciduous plants would come in, and then the spruce would come back in, and the mature forest would regrow.

“Now, that’s all been completely scuttled by the massive fires that occurred here in 2023, and so that gives us a unique opportunity to look at massive fires book-ending this decade of study that we’ve had.”

The sheer scale of the fires in both 2014 and 2023 allows Above to examine what happens to places that burned more than once in that time, or what happened to places that burned a decade ago but not last year, or vice versa.

And while the jet-based research is likely to end this year – it’s possible the jet could return, but this is likely to be its last mission – it will be replaced by a satellite designed to capture similar data every 12 days.

Miller says that means scientists will have access, far into the future, to data that tracks things like permafrost slump and how the boreal forest is regrowing (or not regrowing) after a wildfire. That research can be paired with traditional knowledge and scientific work on the ground to try, in Miller’s words, to “characterize the change that’s taking place and how that change is either making the ecosystems here more vulnerable or more resilient.”

Above’s data can help people understand permafrost slumping and exactly how the Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk Highway is coping with permafrost thaw, for example, and it can also track if an area is growing back with different vegetation than it had prior to a fire.

Ultimately, Miller also wants Above’s work to “make people in the south more aware of just how fast and how dramatically things are changing here in the North.”

Few southerners fully grasp the accelerated rate of climate change in northern latitudes, he says.

“While people might think they’re seeing just changes in the weather, here it really is long-term change in the way that the climate itself is acting. It’s long-term change in the nature of what it’s like to walk across the land, whether you’re seeing permafrost degradation, whether you’re seeing change in the boreal forest and that nice, spongy carpet that you can walk across – is it becoming hard and sandy rather than what we’re used to?” Miller said.

“Are the peatlands drying up? Are the animals changing? Are the numbers of animals changing? Their location and their migratory patterns, are they changing? All of these things are happening and are real and are impacting life here in the North, and just bringing that awareness to people elsewhere in the world is one of the things that I think is important.”