Fjord’s trip north is to help Allen collect data for his PhD research. Allen is interested in using satellite and airborne images to monitor glaciers. Normally, this requires expensive and time intensive field methods. As fun as that may be, it isn’t practical for studying many glaciers across large areas.
Instead, at the end of a melt season, if you can use remote imagery to identify how much of a glacier’s surface is covered by ice, snow from previous years (aka firn), and snow from that past year, then you have a measure of how much the glacier has grown or shrunk in the past year. A nice idea, but, but firn and snow look very similar on satellite images.
SO, the team is going to hike around of glaciers near Ny Ålesund with a field spectroradiometer like this one (fancy instrument to mimic what the satellite is recording) to measure the reflectance of snow/ice/firn across a wide spectrum of wavelengths so that they can better interpret the remote sensing imagery. While they're at it, they'll also be measuring the physical properties which influence snow to look slightly different from firn when seen on an image (e.g. grain size, density, roughness, etc.)
The data will be used to correctly interpret airborne and satellite images of glaciers to tell apart snow, ice, and firn. With the information, new and old images can be used to measure how particular glaciers have been changing in the past decade and what their current behavior is.
Does this make sense to you? Yes? Great! No? It’s probably a bad explanation – ask us a question!
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