New results from NASA's MABEL campaign demonstrated that a
photon-counting technique will allow researchers to track the melt or
growth of Earth’s frozen regions.
When a high-altitude aircraft flew over the icy Arctic Ocean and the
snow-covered terrain of Greenland in April 2012, it was the first polar
test of a new laser-based technology to measure the height of Earth from
space.
Aboard that aircraft flew the Multiple Altimeter Beam Experimental
Lidar, or MABEL, which is an airborne test bed instrument for NASA's
ICESat-2 satellite mission slated to launch in 2017. Both MABEL and
ICESat-2's ATLAS instrument are photon counters – they send out pulses
of green laser light and time how long it takes individual light photons
to bounce off Earth's surface and return. That time, along with ATLAS’
exact position from an onboard GPS, will be plugged into computer
programs to tell researchers the elevation of Earth's surface –
measuring change to as little as the width of a pencil.
This kind of photon-counting technology is novel for satellites; from
2003 to 2009, ICESat-1’s instrument looked at the intensity of a
returned laser signal, which included many photons. So getting
individual photon data from MABEL helps scientists prepare for the vast
amounts of elevation data they'll get from ICESat-2.
"Using the individual photons to measure surface elevation is a
really new thing," said Ron Kwok, a senior research scientist at NASA's
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It's never been done from
orbiting satellites, and it hasn't really been done much with airborne
instruments, either."
ICESat-2 is tasked with measuring elevation across Earth's entire
surface, including vegetation and oceans, but with a focus on change in
the frozen areas of the planet, where scientists have observed dramatic
impacts from climate change. There, two types of ice – ice sheets and
sea ice – reflect light photons in different patterns. Ice sheets and
glaciers are found on land, like Greenland and Antarctica, and are
formed as frozen snow and rain accumulates. Sea ice, on the other hand,
is frozen seawater, found floating in the Arctic Ocean and offshore of
Antarctica.
MABEL's 2012 Greenland campaign was designed to observe a range of
interesting icy features, said Bill Cook, MABEL's lead scientist at
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. With the photon
counts from different surfaces, other scientists could start analyzing
the data to determine which methods of analyzing the data allow them to
best measure the elevation of Earth's surface.
"We wanted to get a wide variety of target types, so that the science
team would have a lot of data to develop algorithms," Cook said. "This
was our first real dedicated science mission."
The flights over the ocean near Greenland, for example, allowed
researchers to demonstrate that they can measure the height difference
between open water and sea ice, which is key to determining the ice
thickness. MABEL can detect enough of the laser light photons that
bounce off Earth surface and return to the instrument, and programs can
then make necessary elevation calculations, Cook said.
Part of what we're doing with MABEL is to demonstrate ICESat-2's
instrument is going to have the right sensitivity to do the
measurements," Cook said. "You can do this photon counting if you have
enough photons."
In an article recently published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology,
Kwok and his colleagues showed how to calculate elevation from MABEL
data, and do so over different types of ice – from open water, to thin,
glassy ice, to the snow-covered ice.
"We were pretty happy with the precision," Kwok said. "The flat areas
are flat to centimeter level, and the rough areas are rough." And the
density of photons detection could also tell researchers what type of
ice the instrument was flying over.
The contours of the icy surface are also important when monitoring
ice sheets and glaciers covering land. The original ICESat-1 mission
employed a single laser, which made it more difficult to measure whether
the ice sheet had gained or lost elevation. With a single beam, when
the instrument flew over a spot a second time, researchers couldn't tell
if the snowpack had melted or if the laser was slightly off and pointed
down a hill. Because of this, scientists needed 10 passes over an area
to determine whether the ice sheet was changing, said Kelly Brunt, a
research scientist at NASA Goddard.
"ICESat-1 was fantastic, but it was a single beam instrument," Brunt
said. "We're more interested in repeating tracks to monitor change –
that's hard to do."
ICESat-2 addresses this problem by splitting the laser into six
beams. These are arranged in three pairs, and the beams within a pair
are spaced 295 feet (90 meters), or just less than a football field
apart. By comparing the height of one site to the height of its
neighbor, scientists can determine the terrain's general slope.
Brunt and her colleagues used MABEL data from the 2012 Greenland
campaign to try to detect slopes as shallow as 4 percent incline; their
results will be published in the May 2014 issue of the journal Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters.
They counted only a portion of the photons, in order to simulate the
weaker laser beams that ICESat-2 will carry. With computer programs to
determine the slope, the researchers verified it against results from
earlier missions.
"The precision is great," Brunt said. "We're very confident that with ICESat-2's beam pair, we can see slope."
And there are still more things for MABEL to measure. The instrument
team is planning a 2014 summer campaign to fly over glaciers and ice
sheets in warmer weather. "We want to see what the effects of the melt
is," Cook said. "How do glaciers look if they're warmer, rather than
colder?"
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