Thermokarst

Photograph of thermokarst feature taken from a helicopter This research project is a collaborative, interdisciplinary effort to study the responses of Arctic landscapes to permafrost degradation known as thermokarst - landscape features caused by structural failure following the melting of ground ice. As the arctic climate warms, there is increasing report of thermokarst incidence. Responses of geomorphology, stream networks, terrestrial and aquatic ecosyststems, however, are poorly understood.

My contribution to this project is monitoring of thermokarst features with polarimetric SAR imagery. Besides my work on the interface between MapReady and PolSARPro that significantly simplified the processing of the polarimetric data, I added the support of complex polarimetric data from TerraSAR-X and Radarsat-2.