Tag: polar science cluster
ArcticSummIT: Arctic Summer Ice Thickness
Prime company: UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL (GB)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 …
STSE CryoSat+ CryoTop Evolution
Prime company: UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH (GB)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, …
Sentinel-3 for Science, Land Study 1: Snow
Prime company: GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF DENMARK AND GREENLAND (DK)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, …
Development of pan-European Multi-Sensor Snow Mapping Methods Exploiting Sentinel-1
Prime company: ENVEO – ENVIRONMENTAL EARTH OBSERVATION GMBH (AT)The main objective is the development, implementation and validation of methods and tools for generating maps of snowmelt area based on SAR data of the Sentinel-1 mission and the combination with snow products derived from optical sensors of Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 missions. The developed algorithm will be used to generate multi-sensor pan-European snow products. A …
Sentinel-3 Performance Improvement for ICE Sheets (SPICE)
Prime company: UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS, SCHOOL OF EARTH AND ENVIRONMENT (GB)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 …
SNAP (Sentinel Application Platform)
The Sentinel Application Platform (SNAP) architecture is ideal for Earth Observation processing and analysis due to the following technological innovations: Extensibility, Portability, Modular Rich Client Platform, Generic EO Data Abstraction, Tiled Memory Management, and a Graph Processing Framework. Feature Highlights Common architecture for all Toolboxes Very fast image display and navigation even of giga-pixel images Graph Processing …
GOCE gravity gradients reveal relics of ancient continents under Antarctica
The combination of seismological and satellite gravity gradient imaging enhance our knowledge of Earth’s structure, especially in remote areas like the Antarctic continent, where even basic knowledge of lithospheric scale features is incomplete. A research team from Kiel University and the British Antarctic Survey exploited the satellite gravity gradients measured from 2009 to 2013 by …
Earth’s squishy interior gives rapid rise to Antarctica
Parts of Earth’s crust are rising very slowly owing to post-glacial rebound, but using GPS, researchers have found that West Antarctica is rising faster than almost anywhere else in the world. And, ESA’s GOCE gravity mission has, in turn, helped them to understand that the mantle below is unusually fluid. Read the full story.
CryoSat Plus For Oceans (CP4O)
Prime company: SATELLITE OCEANOGRAPHIC CONSULTANTS LTD. (GB)The “CryoSat Plus for Oceans” (CP4O) project, supported by the ESA Support to Science Element (STSE) Programme and by CNES, was dedicated to the exploitation of CryoSat-2 data over the open and coastal ocean. The general objectives of the CP4O project were: To build a sound scientific basis for new oceanographic applications of CryoSat-2 data; …