Campaigns

Drilling ice cores

A dedicated land ice campaign is planned for 2007 in Svalbard, Norway. The campaign will address critical validation needs of ESA's CryoSat-2 mission over land and expand on previous efforts made over the Austfonna ice cap. Simultaneously collocated airborne and radar altimeter data and extensive ground measurements are to be collected and analysed to determine geophysical uncertainties in trends of ice thickness recorded by the CryoSat-2 mission. The campaign will also serve as a test of the upgrade ASIRAS system.
 
 
IceARC 2007
Location: North Pole down to southern Greenland. Instrumentation: a ski pole and measuring stick.

The campaign will take advantage of an expedition organised by polar explorers Alain Hubert and Dixie Danscoeur to collect snow thickness measurements across the Arctic Ocean. The team will be taking around 200 snow depth and snow density measurements of every day. This is the data that will be used by ESA to help estimate the uncertainties in CryoSat-2 ice thickness maps over sea due to snow depth and weight on top of the ice.
 
 

Airborne SAR image of sea ice

IceSAR 2007
Location: Svalbard, Norway. Instrumentation: Airborne P-,L-,C- and X-band polarimetric/multi-pol SAR (DLR E-SAR), Airborne Laser scanner + IR camera.

The campaign will provide feedback regarding the baseline Sentinel-1 technical concept - esp. instrument modes, NESZ and resolution – and help identify critical SAR system parameters impacting Sentinel-1 use for ice services. Feedback from the campaign is expected to support complex system choice trade-offs as a results of industrial waivers, establishing thresholds for critical system parameters beyond which service is compromised and verifying operational modes by documenting added value for ice services of dual-pol. VV/VH mode compared to single-pol modes. Additional feedback on the Earth Explorer BIOMASS mission concept for the land ice secondary objective is also expected.
 
 
Last update: 27 September 2006