Topic 3g: The Role of SAR Imagery
In this short audio lecture, David Vaughan explains why SAR imagery has become vitally important to glaciology.
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a sensor that transmits microwave signals to Earth, and then receives back the signals that are returned, or backscattered from the surface. SAR instruments are mounted on satellites, which enables them to cover large areas over a short period of time.
SAR imagery has become vital to data reading and glaciology. It bypasses visibility challenges, such as Antarctic winter and cloud cover. This makes it the most reliable way to measure changes in the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Featured Educator:
- Professor David Vaughan
CRYOSAT-2
Course topics
The core videos of this course are labelled as topic videos.
We have also provided a range of optional further reading, links, and additional resources to help consolidate your learning. Here is a summary of what is available:
Topic links and resources
In each topic, once you have watched the video and read the accompanying text, you will find the following information:
- Optional Further Reading: These are external links to further reading.
- Featured Images and Animations: Below the text on each video page, you’ll find the featured images and featured animations.
- Interactives: On the 'Interactives' tab on relevent topic pages, you will find a satellite tracking application showing the current location of the satellites, a data viewer from the ESA WEkEO platform, as well as a data viewer, specially created for this course, allowing you to explore a selection of data relevant to the themes and topics in this course. (Please note that due to maintenance, the data viewer is currently unavailable).
Quizzes and comments
- Quizzes: At the end of each week there will be a quizz consisting of around five questions. These will help you consolidate your understanding of new topics, but are not scored. The feedback given with each answer also will also provide you with important information.
Weekly interactive exercises
At the end of each week, we have included a guided exercise, using interactive apps available on other websites, to help you become more familiar with looking at and working with EO datasets. You will be guided through the process of searching for, comparing and drawing conclusions from data relevant to some of the topics covered in that week.
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