Applying a novel analytical theory, scientists have a fast new way of retrieving snow grain size – and albedo – from Sentinel-3 data. Read more about the importance of snow grain size and the results obtained in the Pre-Operational Sentinel-3 snow and ice products (SICE) project in ESA EO portal featured story.
Observing phenomena occurring in remote locations at high latitudes is not an easy task. Apart from the scarcity of in-situ measurements available in locations such as Greenland, satellite observations with optical sensors are often hindered by the presence of clouds and lack of sunlight during wintertime. That is why scientists look at ways to combine …
Jack is a Lecturer in Geodesy at the University of Bristol. He completed an Undergraduate Degree (B.Sc.) in Physical Geography at the University of Durham, U.K. in 2009, followed by a Masters Degree by Research (M.Sc. Res.), specializing in airborne LiDAR remote sensing, at the same institution in 2011. He completed his doctorate (Ph.D.), specializing …
The loss of ice from Antarctica is one of the principal causes of contemporary sea level rise. Tracking the changes that are currently occurring across this remote and inaccessible continent requires systematic satellite monitoring programmes. From these unique observational platforms, robust long-term climate records can be developed, which help scientists to understand and to predict …
Living Planet Fellowship research project carried out by Bas Altena. Earth observation plays an important role in society and business, today, and more so in the near future. Several times a day, satellite systems acquire data over targeted areas or with global coverage, which will only increase in the future. Imagery for velocity products will …
Living Planet Fellowship research project carried out by Jack Landy. Arctic-SummIT will deliver, for the first time, a sea ice thickness product during summer months from the ESA Cryosat-2 satellite. As the extent of Arctic sea ice has declined at unprecedented speed over the past few decades, we have been able to view only limited …
Bas Altena currently works as a postdoc at the department of Geosciences, University of Oslo as an ESA Living Planet fellow. His background is in Geodesy, Geomatics and Computer Vision, done in Utrecht, Delft and Leuven, respectively. All these different components come together in his work where he studies glaciers and other frozen phenomena. Bas …
The aim of the CryoTop Evolution is to generate L2, L3 and L4 products over the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets from swath processing of CryoSat SARIn mode data. The CryoTop datasets contain surface elevation generated from swath processing of CryoSat-2 measurement. The CryoTop datasets also contain gridded products generated from the swath derived elevation, …
This SEOM study is to develop, implement and validate algorithms for deriving several key snow parameters from Sentinel 3 optical satellite data, appropriate for addressing ESA’s Cryosphere challenge (Seasonal snow, lake/river ice and land ice, their effect on the climate system, water resources, energy and carbon cycles: the representation of terrestrial cryosphere in land surface, …
SPICE (Sentinel-3 Performance improvement for ICE sheets) is a 2-year study, which began in September 2015 and has been funded by ESA’s SEOM (Scientific Exploitation of Operational Missions) program. The project aims to contribute to the development and evaluation of novel SAR altimetry processing methodologies over ice sheets, primarily using dedicated CryoSat-2 SAR acquisitions made …
