Glaciers are responding rapidly to climate change and are likely to be the second largest contributor to sea level rise over the 21st century. However there are large uncertainties in the mass balance estimation in particular for calving glaciers, the main contributors to ice loss in certain climatic sensitive areas. In order to understand and develop realistic scenarios for glacier depletion,...
The geodetic mass balance is a method to describe the development of glaciers or ice sheets without the need for modelling of precipitation and melting. The measurement is based on changes in surface elevation that occur over the entire area attributed to a single glacier or sector of an ice sheet. Most recent geodetic mass balance measurements on ice sheets have been performed with laser and...
Digital elevation models, derived from single-pass interferometric SAR (SP-InSAR) data, are a main source for mapping surface elevation and its temporal change over ice sheets and glaciers. SP-InSAR data are not affected by temporal decorrelation and variations in atmospheric delay, but effects of signal penetration have to be taken into account. The apparent surface for uncorrected InSAR...
Single pass radar interferometry (sp-InSAR) is a well established
technique for generation of digital elevation models
(DEM). Differencing two DEMs acquired at different times
can reveal topographic changes. However snow depth estimation
by DEM differencing is still an ongoing topic in radar
research: in contrast to snow free surfaces, the snow surface
elevation is difficult to detect either...
The synergistic use of data from different satellites of the Sentinel series offers excellent capabilities for generating advanced products on parameters of the global climate system and environment. A key parameter for climate monitoring, hydrology and water management is the seasonal snow cover. In the frame of the ESA project SEOM S1-4-SCI Snow, led by ENVEO, we developed, implemented and...
Snow is a transient state of water which can store significant amounts of water on the earth surface. The extreme albedo affects the earth's radiation balances and the water content is important for hydrological applications. Therefore, many different remote sensing methods focus on snow parameter retrieval. However, such parameter retrieval often requires significant modeling expertise,...
Multi-frequency SAR measurements provide more exhaustive information of a given scattering scenario, compared to the single-frequency case, due to the sensitivity of longer and shorter wavelengths to scatterers of different size. In combination with polarimetry, they potentially allow to retrieve geometric and dielectric properties of scatterers at different size scales. For snow and ice...
One of the recommendations resulting from previous radar-based earth observation mission concepts for snow parameter retrieval is that high-resolution imagery of the vertical structure of snow is required to gain further insight into the complex electromagnetic interaction within snowpacks.
As part of the ESA SnowLab campaign the SnowScat device, a terrestrial stepped-frequency continuous-wave...
Microwave penetration into dry snow, firn and ice bodies leads to the fact that the backscattered signals received by SAR sensors depend on the characteristics of the subsurface of glaciers and ice sheets. This provides a potential link between SAR measurements and geophysical information, e.g. density, firn thickness, stratigraphy, accumulation rate, and melt-refreeze features.
While SAR...
