Newsletter June 2016

CIRFA Newsletter June 2016

Tromsø 10.06.2016

Dear Partners,

In the week before Easter, the CIRFA personnel in Tromsø moved from the NOFIMA building on the UiT-Campus to the new and permanent location in Forskningsparken or SIVA Innovasjonssenter Tromsø, as it is now called.  CIRFA is well established in the new office space, and we find the new location to work well for us, and we appreciate the neighborhood with Norut, and the possibility to enjoy the rich lunch menu at the cafeteria.

As a result of having a better physical environment, CIRFA has now started up with regular science seminars, and has already had two of these, on April 29th and May 26th. These seminars are meant to be a scientific forum, where students and researchers can present new results, but also get feedback and discussions on issues of relevance for their research. The seminars are announced on our website, and are open to all that are interested.

Outreach: This is the season for conferences, and CIRFA was well represented at the ESA Living Planet conference that took place in Prague, in May, we were present at EUSAR in June, and at IGARSS in July. References to our contributions are published on our website, and the papers will be uploaded to our internal archive, which all the partners have access to. CIRFA was also one of two SFIs, which were presented at the Norway – Japan Arctic Sience and Innovation Week. The other one was SAMCoT, NTNU. CIRFA will in August/September be presented in a technical session during the ONS .

We congratulate Camilla Brekke, Stine Skrunes and coworkers with the first accepted journal papers from NORSE2015 oil spill remote sensing campaign. NORSE2015 is the first campaign that has been conducted with active CIRFA participation. Two papers have so far been accepted for publication:

Brekke, C., C. E. Jones, S. Skrunes, B. Holt, M. Espeseth and T. Eltoft (2016): Cross-Correlation Between Polarization Channels in SAR Imagery Over Oceanographic Features, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, pp. 5, 2016 (accepted).

Skrunes, S., C. Brekke, C. Jones, and B. Holt (2016): A Multisensor Comparison of Experimental Oil Spills in Polarimetric SAR for High Wind Conditions, Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observation and Remote Sensing, 2016 (accepted).

Campaigns: CIRFA team members from Norut, NTNU and the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI) were involved in a field campaign in Ny-Ålesund on Svalbard, which was carried out in April 2016. The campaign was not primarily a CIRFA campaign, but CIRFA was involved, and data was collected to support the work in WP2, WP4 and WP6. Field measurements, drone measurements, and coordinated satellite images were collected from fjord ice and drifting icebergs, and the data will further analyzed to study iceberg detection performance and sea ice classification from SAR. It also represents a first dataset to investigate operational aspects of the combined use of drone and satellite based observations. This issue will be further explored in the upcoming Framstrait campaign in August/September. A report from the Ny-Ålesund campaign can be found on our website.

CIRFA Annual Conference:

The CIRFA’s Annual Conference will, as many of you already have been informed about, take place on Sommarøy, Troms, an hour’s drive from Tromsø, on September 13 and 14. This conference will serve as an important arena for CIRFA’s partners to exchange ideas. The primary focus of the conference will be to present ongoing activities and early results in the field of integrated remote sensing and forecasting for Arctic operations and the program will cover a variety of key topics such as:

• Research profile

• Innovation strategy

• Collaboration

• Communication strategy

The registration is now open, and we hope to see many of you there.

Best regards,

Torbjørn Eltoft