[CRYOLIST] New satellite images of Antarctica now available

RADARSAT continental mosaics and high-resolution tiles of Antarctica from 1997 and 2000 are available at the Polar Data Catalogue, https://polardata.ca/pdcsearch!  These images have been converted into updated, more easily accessible formats (GeoTiff) and can be compared to the 2008 Antarctic mosaics from RADARSAT-2 which were released on the PDC in 2014.  All three datasets can be found under the "RADARSAT Mosaics of Antarctica" collection in the PDC, and all imagery can be freely downloaded.

Many thanks to MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. and the Canadian Space Agency for making this possible and to the Byrd Polar Research Center for online provision of the mosaics in their original formats.  See below for further information on all three mosaics.  We hope these images are useful to you!

The RADARSAT-1 Antarctic Mapping Project (RAMP) and RADARSAT-2 Antarctic Mapping Initiative were undertaken to provide snapshots of the Antarctic continent over a span of more than a decade, to document the state of the ice cover in Antarctica and to show changes over time in the land and sea ice around the southern continent. RAMP was a collaboration between the Canadian Space Agency and the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to map Antarctica using the RADARSAT-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) in two missions. The first, the Antarctic Mapping Mission 1 (AMM-1), completed in September-October 1997, maneuvered the RADARSAT-1 satellite to a left-looking "Antarctic Mode" to capture the entirety of the continent, developing the first high-resolution SAR mosaic of Antarctica. The second, the Modified Antarctic Mapping Mission (MAMM), completed in September-November 2000, captured imagery north of 80°S all the way to the Antarctic coast, in both ascending and descending orbits. The objective of this mission was to observe changes in the ice sheet from the 1997 AMM-1 dataset and to use the multiple acquisitions to estimate the surface velocity of target areas of the ice sheet.

The RADARSAT-2 Antarctic Mapping Initiative, completed in October-December 2008, was undertaken to produce a continental mosaic consistent with the 1997 RADARSAT-1 Antarctic Mapping Mission. The resulting mosaics and individual high-resolution tiles, produced in collaboration with the Byrd Polar Research Center, cover all the way to the South Pole, repeating the coverage of the 1997 mission. In addition to enhancing the achievements of the RADARSAT-1 Antarctic missions, the intent of the 2008 mission was to facilitate change analysis through space-borne observation of ice sheets. Such data are important for generation of global climate products, including models. The 2008 mission was the result of international collaboration associated with the International Polar Year (IPY) and is a Canadian Space Agency contribution to IPY, incorporating input from the scientific community, with the goal of making science products available for free.

Dana Church, PhD
Project and Outreach Coordinator
The Canadian Cryospheric Information Network and Polar Data Catalogue
www.ccin.ca | www.polardata.ca | @polardata
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1 Canada
519-888-4567 ext. 37572
dchurch@uwaterloo.ca