Radar Depth Sounder Processing and Digital Thickness Map of Outlet Glaciers By

• Main Author: Harish N. Ramamoorthy
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Greenland; Antarc*; Antarctica; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.142.954; http://www.ittc.ku.edu/research/thesis/documents/harish_ramamoorthy_thesis.pdf

In the advent of global warming’s threatening effects on the environment, quantifying it by monitoring the mass balance of the ice sheets has become one of the major challenges in the field of remote sensing. The rate at which polar ice sheets melt is attributed to global warming. Ice sheet thickness is intrinsically related to the flow dynamics of outlet glaciers that drain a major portion of the polar ice into the ocean. To understand the mechanism of glacial flow, knowledge of the topography of the bedrock is essential. Since 1993, when NASA initiated a program to measure the mass balance of the ice sheets, the Radar Systems and Remote Sensing Laboratory (RSL) at the University of Kansas has been conducting experiments in Greenland and Antarctica using radar depth sounder systems to measure the thickness of the polar ice sheets. Radar returns are collected over these regions and are then processed to interpret the echo from the surface and bedrock to determine the ice thickness. In this project, we investigate the signal-processing techniques applied to the radar return to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio and accurately determine ice thickness. The