Remote sensing of Greenland ice sheet surface characteristics using Sentinel 3 satellites

In recent decades, changes of global climate have had a profound effect on the cryosphere and in particular on polar glaciers. These glaciers, such as those in Greenland, have an important role in the global climate regulation via their low albedo, drive major currents by pouring fresh water into the ocean and are a major contributor to the sea level rise. Modeling the mass loss of those glacier is an important part in quantifying all of those effects. However, glaciers present a variety of snow and ice facies, that behave very differently depending on temperature, amount of snow fall and amount of snow melt. Describing and mapping snow facies over all polar glaciers is therefore primordial. In this project, we study previous methods to use remote sensing from passive microwave and radar satellites to map these facies, propose new methods to classify them and propose new methods to assess the quality of those classifications.

近几十年来，全球气候变化对冰冻圈（cryosphere）产生了深远影响，尤其对极地冰川影响显著。这些冰川（如格陵兰岛的冰川）通过其低反照率（albedo）在全球气候调节中发挥重要作用，向海洋注入淡水以驱动主要洋流，并且是海平面上升的主要贡献者。对这些冰川的质量损失进行建模是量化所有这些影响的重要环节。然而，冰川呈现出多种雪冰相（snow and ice facies），其特性因温度、降雪量和融雪量的不同而存在显著差异。因此，对所有极地冰川的雪相进行描述与制图是首要任务。本项目研究了利用被动微波和雷达卫星遥感绘制这些相的现有方法，提出了新的分类方法，并开发了评估这些分类质量的新方案。