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Scientific personnel
G. Grosse, V.E. Romanovsky (GI
Permafrost Laboratory), Kenji Yoshikawa (WERC)
This project is made possible by funding through the University
of Alaska IPY Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship and the provision
of ALOS satellite data through the ALOS North American Data Node
at the Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF).
Objectives
The characterization and quantification of permafrost degradation
in different environments is of high interest in a global warming
environment. An appropriate ALOS remote sensing dataset from a wide
range of permafrost sites would be a major asset for this goal.
Within IAPED, ALOS remote sensing data will be acquired for different
environmental conditions along latitudinal transects in Alaska.
The data will be used for the generation of DEM and multi-sensor
land cover classifications. Sites were selected on the basis of
availability of existing environmental datasets from finished or
ongoing studies (permafrost, geology, climatology, palaeo-environment).
The ALOS PRISM data will be used for the construction of high-resolution
DEM of these sites equivalent to 1:25 000 map scale. These DEM allow
e.g. the quantification of subsidence areas due to Holocene permafrost
degradation, as well as the identification of hydrological components
of thermokarst and thermo-erosion. In conjunction with multi-spectral
and radar imagery from AVNIR-2 and PALSAR, the surface characteristics
of the study areas will be determined applying land cover classifications
based on multi-sensor image processing. Similar approaches have
been successfully tested for DEM derived from digitized topographic
maps and Landsat-7 imagery (Grosse et al., 2006). It is expected
to derive much more detailed information from higher-resolution
PRISM DEM and AVNIR-2 data, and the incorporation of PALSAR data.
The resulting datasets from the various study areas will be analyzed
along with local climatologic and geologic data, and compared between
each other.
Additionally, for some sites, interferometric analyses with multi-temporal
PALSAR data will be conducted. From this three-year study, information
on surface changes related to permafrost degradation at these sites
could be derived. Additional ground truth information will be collected
from existing permanent climate stations (surface and subsurface)
at these sites and by new D-GPS data.
Publications resulting from this
project
The project has just started and no publications are available
yet.
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