Collaborative Proposal: Science Opportunities for a Multidisciplinary Long-Range Aircraft for Antarctic Research

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This award provides support to host a three-day workshop in September 2004 to formulate a science justification for a long-range research aircraft. The workshop will bring together scientists representing the Antarctic research community's interest in having an aircraft for modern aerogeophysical, glaciological, atmospheric and oceanographic science. The specific goals of the workshop are to: 1) Develop a strong science and implementation plan for a multi-disciplinary long-range research aircraft facility; 2) Produce a high-quality workshop report that will create the necessary impact given the scope of the project and 3) Submit an article to the AGU publication EOS that summarizes the deliberation and recommendations of the workshop in order to ensure the widest possible dissemination. The intellectual merit of this workshop includes the fact that there are many different problems in a variety of fields (e.g. solid earth geophysics, glaciology, atmospheric sciences) that can only be addressed with a long-range research aircraft and without such an aircraft progress will never be made in advancing these areas of science. In terms of broader impacts, broad community interest in having the capability to enable a more in-depth exploration of the Antarctic continent comes on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the International Geophysical Year. The upcoming International Polar Year (IPY) scheduled for 2007-2009 will be a wonderful opportunity to excite the public about polar research and such an aircraft will play an important role by transporting novel and comprehensive instrumentation to many parts of Antarctica to provide observations of key processes taking place in the atmosphere, ice sheet, solid earth and in the oceans. IPY will also provide a wonderful opportunity to train the next generation of polar scientists and having a long-range aircraft will enable many new areas of scientific discovery which are not possible at the current time without such a facility.