CIRFA at an ALOS-2 workshop in Tokyo

CIRFA and the Earth Observation (EO) group at UiT were present at the 2. PI-workshop for the Japanese ALOS-2 satellite, which took place in the Akihabara Convention Centre from November 17^th to 20^th, 2015. CIRFA was represented by centre leader Torbjørn Eltoft, and the EO group by Malin Johansson.

Text and images by Malin Johansson and Torbjørn Eltoft

Tokyo and Akihabara showing itself from its best during the workshop.

On the 17^th, the focus was on domestic applications of ALOS-2 data, and here Torbjørn was invited to give a talk on sea ice monitoring. He gave a presentation titled “Monitoring Sea Ice with Space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar”.

Thanks to splendid work from Malin Johansson and Thomas Kræmer this spring, CIRFA and the EO-group are sitting on excellent data sets over sea ice, including collocated acquisitions in X, C, and L-band. Based on this data we gave two presentations, presenting preliminary results, at the international WS:

Torbjørn’s was entilted: “A first analysis of polarimetric Arctic sea ice scenes from PALSAR-2”

Malin’s was entitled: ”Newly formed sea ice in Fram Strait leads monitored by X-, C- and L-band SAR”.

In the left part of the image (red circle) the amount of images taken over the N-ICE area is visible. We are very grateful to JAXA for all these images. On the right Torbjørn giving his presentation

After the workshop Malin and Torbjørn participated in a meeting with JAXA and the Norwegian Space Center at JAXA’s office in Tokyo to plan a side-event at next years Arctic Frontiers conference. The side-event is planned to take place on Wednesday January 27^th, 2016, and CIRFA was asked to contribute with further results on comparisons on sea ice satellite observations in C and L-band.