Shadow Decompositions of the Cryosphere

Shane Cloude, AEL Consultants

Wednesday 5th March, 1-2pm, Cottrell 2V1 and streamed on Teams (contact the seminar organiser for the Teams link).

This seminar is open to all staff, students and affiliates of the University of Stirling. The seminar is hosted by Biological and Environmental Sciences (BES).

Who this might appeal to: Primarily of interest to Earth and Planetary Observation group and those working in associated topics.

Abstract: The European Space Agency’s Sentinel Satellites offer unprecedented global spatial and temporal coverage for a range of remote sensing applications. A corner stone of the Sentinel spectrum is a constellation of imaging radar satellites. While backscatter and interferometry are the two most popular operational modes, the radar satellites also offer coherent dual polarimetry, effectively measuring the full polarization ellipse of the scattered wave. In this talk we show how best to exploit the polarized sentinels to extract physical parameters of interest. We show that Sentinel offers only a shadow of full polarimetric information and develop an explicit form for the shadow mapping. This allows us to better interpret scattering from complex media. In this talk we use land ice as an important example where polarization effects are strong, and with a view to applying similar ideas to future interplanetary radars, mapping for example the surface of frozen moons of the solar system.

Bio: Shane Cloude received his B.Sc. (Hons.) degree from the University of Dundee, U.K., in 1981, and Ph.D. degree from the University of Birmingham, U.K., in 1987. He then worked as a Radar Scientist with the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment, Great Malvern, U.K. Following this, he held teaching and research posts at the University of Dundee, the University of York and the University of Nantes, France. For 20 years he was then Senior Scientist and Director of AELc, a consultancy company based in Scotland, undertaking research and advanced training on a range of topics associated with radar and optics. His main research interests are in polarization effects in electromagnetic scattering and their applications in radar and optical remote sensing. Dr Cloude is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, and held the inaugural chair as Professor of Radar at the University of Adelaide, SA, Australia.