A paper published in Nature describes a new approach for removing the pesky problem of dazzle from surface meltwater to yield the first ever continuous, year-round, altimetry measurements of sea-ice thickness in the Arctic Ocean. Artificial intelligence techniques have been applied to CryoSat data in the Arctic to distinguish, during the summer period, the melting …
Over the last decades, greenhouse gases and aerosol concentrations have been increasing in the atmosphere, disrupting the balance in the Earth system between incoming and outgoing radiation fluxes. Part of the outgoing longwave radiation being blocked, the system has reemitted less energy towards space than it has received from the Sun. This imbalance at the …
A recent paper investigates the role of Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) and Sea Surface Temperature (SST), together with Sea Level Anomaly and Argo profiles in Tropical Instability Waves (TIWs) in the equatorial Atlantic Ocean during the period 2010–2018. Tropical Instability Waves (TIWs) are a phenomenon in which the interface between areas of warm and cold …
A sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) is a large-scale meteorological phenomenon in the winter stratosphere, which involves a rapid rise in the polar temperature by a few tens of kelvins in several days. SSWs are triggered by an injection of stationary planetary waves from the troposphere. These events are rare in the Southern Hemisphere, therefore they …
Monitoring of the melt season contributes to characterizing the seasonal and interannual climatic variations in Antarctica and is important for assessing the future stability of the ice sheet. Due to its 1.4 GHz frequency, SMOS can penetrate much deeper into the ice compared to other microwave imagers operating at 19 GHz: this implies that joint use …
Lack of in-situ measurements of ice temperature (boreholes) limit our capabilities to understand ice sheet dynamics. Researchers combined L-band (1.4 GHz) passive microwave observations from SMOS over Antarctica with glaciological and emission models to infer information on glaciological properties of the ice sheet at various depths, including temperature. Comparison with existing models showed that differences …
Interferometric (InSAR) short-time-series of Sentinel-1 SAR data acquired over central Europe were exploited in a new approach for the generation of large-scale thematic maps. Temporal features, extracted from the evolution of the interferometric coherence, together with backscatter, were used as input for a machine learning-based classifier. Three land cover classes were extracted: artificial surfaces, forests, …
Ice sheet dynamics is strongly related to basal melting and geothermal heat flow, which in turn is influenced by crustal thickness variations. On the other hand, the lithosphere of the Antarctic continent is still poorly known. Different datasets (airborne gravity and magnetic measurements, seismological campaigns) exist but mostly suffer from limited spatial coverage over large …
The Science and Applications with Sentinel-2 special issue of Remote Sensing of Environment has been completed with the last paper published on 5 April 2019. It features a selection of 28 key papers covering a wide range of new applications monitoring natural and human-induced dynamic processes up to national and even continental scale at high-resolution. …
