A multidimensional analysis of sea ice melt pond properties from aerial images ...

• Main Author: Fuchs, Niels
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Universität Bremen 2023
• Subjects: polar regions; Arctic; Sea Ice; melt ponds; Airborne observations; High-resolution aerial imaging; Pond bathymetry; Albedo; image classification; Photogrammetry; 500; albedo; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.26092/elib/2249; https://media.suub.uni-bremen.de/handle/elib/6928

Sea ice plays a fundamental role in Polar climate and ecosystems. Melt ponds, forming routinely on Arctic sea ice during summer, can cover and impact a considerable fraction of the ice area. However, data that allow a comprehensive understanding of pond evolution processes remain scarce. Consequently, we cannot yet predict how ponds will develop on the increasingly prevalent young ice in the future. Previous studies have drawn a very heterogeneous picture of pond coverage on young ice, which we can only improve with more detailed measurement data and analysis tools that allow the derivation of properties possibly driving pond evolution. The existence of over ten years of high-resolution aerial image data from AWI aircraft campaigns in the Arctic has motivated me to develop and refine evaluation methods for this dataset, the one-year drift campaign MOSAiC, and future measurement campaigns. I created a customized classification algorithm to classify images into sea ice surface classes with minimal manual ...