Topic 4e: Lake Ice
In this audio lecture Kirsikka Heinilä, Senior Research Scientist at the Finnish Environment Institute, explains the importance of being able to monitor lake ice, and the relationship that lake ice has with the environment. She explains the benefits that remote sensing of lake ice has over in-situ measurements.
Seasonal river and lake ice covers roughly 2% of the Earth’s surface. It is important that we can understand and track this ice because seasonal ice roads are a key transportation route for some communities.
Phenology is the study of cyclic and seasonal natural events, especially in relation to climate, and plant and animal life. There are three main events of lake ice phenology:
- In autumn, lakes begin to freeze
- In winter, the bottoms of the lakes freeze
- In spring, the ice breaks up
These phases are mainly affected by air temperature - so they are a good indicator of local climate patterns.
For example, cold weather has previously covered the River Danube in ice. The river is one of Europe’s most important inland shipping routes. Using the COSMO-Skymed constellation of satellites, SAR instruments were used to monitor the conditions of the river and provide warnings to those trying to navigate the river.
Featured Educator:
- Dr Kirsikka Heinilä
SKYMED 1
SKYMED 2
SKYMED 3
SKYMED 4
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.
- ESA CCI - Lakes
- Lake Ice Detection from Sentinel-1 SAR With Deep Learning - Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
- Skating on thick ice: touring Sweden’s frozen lakes - The Guardian
- What is the trend in the ice cover of rivers and lakes across Europe? - European Environment Agency
- CryoSat Conquers Ice On Arctic Lakes - ESA
- Lake and River Ice Phenology - NSIDC
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Climate Change leaves thousands of lakes ice-free and millions of people lose their homes as winter does not bring on frozen lake covers
