The Cryospheric Science Group of the Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change (IC3) is pleased to welcome PhD candidate Aaron Thompson to present his research at our seminar this month. His presentation is entitled:
"Radar scatterometer measurements of arctic tundra and alpine snowpacks: A review of UWScat deployment during winter 2017, from NASA’s SnowEx project to Trail Valley Creek"
Aaron Thompson & Richard Kelly
University of Waterloo
Snow water equivalent (SWE) is an important physical parameter to many research communities and its retrieval, especially over large areas, remains a priority of the snow remote sensing community. Much attention has been focused on the use of active microwave systems due to their all-weather capability and improvements in spatial resolution over passive microwave instruments. However forest canopies and certain buried vegetation confounds the retrieval of SWE and their influence needs to be better articulated before large-scale SWE retrieval can be successfully accomplished. Improving our understanding of the influence of forest canopy on SWE retrieval is one of the primary objectives of the NASA SnowEx project and so this presentation will outline the activities and early results of SnowEx –year 1 with a focus on UWScat deployment in February, 2017, and a complimentary field campaign at Trail Valley Creek, NWT in April 2017. During both campaigns, vegetated and non-vegetated sites were explored alongside a range of SWE in both alpine and tundra snow environments in order to address this question.
Location Information
200 University Avenue West
225
Waterloo , ON, CA N2L 3G1