Future UAV pilot David Rippin – Introduction

I’ve recently got interested in exploring how water travels across the surface of glaciers.  A few decades ago, the way in which supraglaical streams meander across glaciers was an area of some interest to glaciologist, but there’s really not much that’s been published in recent years.  In contrast however, we as glaciologists are increasingly interested in surface water of another sort – that is, large lakes that form on the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet annually.  These lakes contain large volumes of water, and they have shown to drain very rapidly, with lots of evidence to suggest that this drained water can get to the ice-sheet bed, and thereby influence ice dynamics by lubricating the glacier bed.  Supraglacial lakes are also found elsewhere, but it’s the Greenlandic ones that have really garnered a lot of interest recently.

This increased interest in Greenlandic supraglacial water, and the fact that no one had done much on supraglacial channels (that also might feed these Greenlandic lakes) is what has been occupying some of my time of late.  From a technological point of view, I’m also interested in using remote sensing approaches, and have been very taken with the possibility of collecting and analysing my own data, and not relying on larger campaigns that employ aircraft.

I had read about QuestUAV, and was impressed with the kit they had on offer.  However, due to limited funds, it seemed to be out of my reach.  However, a call out-of-the-blue from Nigel King at Quest, suggested that we might be able to work together after all, and that’s where we currently stand.  I’m very excited to have what looks like a tremendous piece of equipment, and can’t wait to deploy it for the first time.  I’ve yet to have my training, but that is due to take place in a couple of months.  After that, in August, I’m off to Svalbard to work on a glacier that I’ve done a lot of (different) work on previously, to put my UAV through its paces and hopefully bring back some fantastic imagery and data that documents the changing form of supraglacial channels at a high temporal and spatial resolution.