Jürgen Bula, CEO of Bremen Airport, shares his excitement for the choice of the new base: “We are proud to welcome the first polar research plane here.”

Since the beginning of October the Alfred Wegener Institute has been renting a 1,400 square metre area at the Ryanair terminal. “In the meantime our employees have been organising their new workplace and finding homes for electronic measuring equipment and spare parts”, says Dr Uwe Nixdorf, head of AWI logistics and Deputy Director. About five employees from his division coordinate the aircraft missions in Bremen and equip Polar 6, and its sister plane Polar 5, with instruments and devices for the polar research missions.

With stopovers in Keflavik (Iceland) and Scotland the Polar 6 has arrived from its mission in Muskoka, Canada, where, among other things, the AWI employees tested a new radar system for surveying glaciers and sea ice in collaboration with the company Lake Central. The new radar system is set to be used in the Arctic this year. During this typical research mission the AWI planes will employ the cutting-edge ice radar to measure, with the utmost precision, the thickness of glaciers in Greenland. After comparing the newly collected data with data from satellite surveys and ice drilling missions on site the researchers will gain insight in how much the Arctic ice caps have decreased in size due to global warming. Other missions for the research planes are, for instance, surveying sea ice or exploring the polar atmosphere.

Bremen is expecting the sister plane Polar 5 for the first time at the end of April. Until the beginning of February Polar 5 was on a mission for research and logistics in the Antarctic, where some of its tasks were glacier surveys, too. Polar 5 also picked up scientists from a camp on the Filchner ice shelf, who had spent several weeks examining the characteristics of Antarctic ice shelves with skidoos and sledges. The plane is currently undergoing maintenance work on the main base of the aircraft operator Kenn Borek Air in Calgary, Canada, as instructed by the AWI.