Remote Sensing Application in Antarctic Inland Areas

Grove Mountains is located to the southwest of Princess Elizabeth Land, Antarctic inland areas, 400km away from the Chinese Zhongshan Station. This paper will discuss the application of the SAR, optical and altimetry data in Grove Mountains. Firstly, the improved DEM is generated. It is still difficult to get the accurate DEM of the whole Grove Mountains which is about 8000 kilometers square because the sloping terrain and the baseline error exist. Based on the InSAR DEM and ICESat footprints, the high precision DEM of the whole area can be obtained. Secondly, the distribution of blue ice is obtained both in optical image and coherence map. Based on the different spectrum characteristics of snow, blue ice and bared rocks, blue ice can be extracted in the optical image. And because of the higher coherence of the blue ice than snow and mountains area, it can also be identified easily in the coherence map derived from the ERS-1/2 tandem SAR data. Finally, crevasse detection is studied base on SAR image, optical image and coherence map. Based on the texture characteristics, gray level co-occurrence matrix and Gabor filter are chosen to recognize the crevasse. Basing on the study of Grove Mountains, more new technologies and satellite data shall be adopted to detect the ice surface change, ice flow velocity, etc, which are signal to the global environment change. * Corresponding author.