Presenter
Kutalmis Saylam
Research Scientist Associate IV
Bureau of Economic Geology
Jackson School of Geosciences
The University of Texas at Austin
Description
In 2022, the Bureau of Economic Geology (BEG) at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) responded to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) inquiry to participate in an airborne data acquisition campaign over coincident Arctic Sea locations in northwestern Greenland and northeastern Canada. The proposed validation/calibration campaign provides NASA and all other involved scientists with highly accurate airborne lidar data sets to evaluate the accuracy of sea ice surface heights as measured by ICESat-2 ATLAS (Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System). A Leica Chiroptera-4x airborne lidar system was installed in a Gulfstream-V aircraft with a glass viewport alongside NASA’s Land, Vegetation and Ice Sensor (LVIS). In July 2022, UT Austin and NASA researchers acquired sea ice data during a series of airborne missions, flown from Thule Air Base in Greenland. Despite constraints such as the low flight altitude requirements of Chiroptera, local weather conditions, and other logistical challenges, coincident measurements were collected during two missions. In total, 138 minutes of airborne lidar and high-resolution 4-band imaging data were collected at an altitude of 500 meters over the Arctic Sea. Approximately 11,000 km2 of sea ice was mapped by each of Chiroptera’s scanners.
Preliminary results indicate robust correspondence (mean difference of 7-8 cm, RMSE is 20 cm) between the Chiroptera NIR and ATLAS-07 sensors for measuring sea ice surface heights. Ongoing efforts will quantify surface height accuracies using green-wavelength data, determine melt pond depths, and apply machine learning methods to predict sea ice surface heights where coincident data were not available.
