Presentations from the ESA Polar Science Cluster Collocation Meeting held on 15 – 17 September 2021. Day 1 – Wednesday 15th September 2021 EC RTD welcome, Ana-Maria Stan EU Polar Cluster, Nicole Biebow and Elaina Ford Cryosat status, Tommaso Parrinello SA Polar Campaigns, Tania Casal and Dirk Schuettemeyer CryoSat+ Antarctic ocean, Steven Baker, Jean-Alexis Daguze …
Pronounced climatic changes have been observed at the Antarctic Peninsula within the past decades and its glaciers and ice caps have been identified as a significant contributor to global sea level rise. Dynamic thinning and speed-up was reported for various tidewater glaciers on the western Antarctic Peninsula. On the east coast, several ice shelves disintegrated …
The ESA Polar Science Cluster involves a set of different ESA-funded scientific activities addressing different aspects of Polar research. Through this set of projects ESA aims at working hand by hand with the scientific community to: Improve our observation capacity over Polar regions and contribute to develop the next generation of Polar observations from …
The thin ozone layer positioned in stratosphere is crucial for the survival of life on Earth. This stratospheric ozone layer shields the Earth from most of the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation. In the late 1970s, scientists found out that humanity was creating a hole in this protective ozone shield. In 1985, the Vienna Convention for …
Estimating sea ice thickness is essential to monitor the effects of long-term climatic change and understand their consequences for Arctic ecosystems. The continued sea ice loss – widely observed through EO data since 1979 – is bringing to an increased Arctic maritime activity for which timely forecasts of ice conditions are required too, to ensure …
Ice velocity is an essential parameter to study ice sheet and glacier dynamics. It is needed to estimate the mass flux and discharge of ice from the accumulation zone to the ocean and hence influences estimates of ice sheet mass balance and sea level rise. Furthermore, ice velocity measurements constitute valuable input for constraining and …
Outcomes of the first European Polar Science event, part of a new ESA-EC joint Earth System Science initiative, aimed at fostering closer collaboration and networking across the EU and ESA Polar activities.
The ALBATROSS Project (ALtimetry for BAthymetry and Tide Retrievals for the Southern Ocean, Sea ice and ice Shelves) , led by NOVELTIS in collaboration with DTU, NPI and UCL, is one of the activities funded by ESA in the frame of the Polar Science Cluster, with the objective to foster collaborative research and interdisciplinary networking …
Sea ice in key Arctic coastal regions is thinning at a rate of 70–100% faster than previously thought. These values, reported in a paper recently published in The Cryosphere, are derived when the sea ice thickness in the period 2002–2018 is calculated using new snow data with more realistic variability and trends. Results are outcomes …
The AI for the Arctic (AI4ARCTIC) project applies deep learning, in particular deep convolutional neural networks, for Earth observation applications within the cryosphere, focusing on sea ice and snow. The project trains deep-learning systems from relevant training data, and tests and demonstrates the capability of deep learning by applying it to large-scale inference of cryosphere-related …
