RADARSAT-1 Background Mission Monitoring of the Arctic

Abstract

RADARSAT-1 baseline data acquisition planning has been performed for the past nine years under the Canadian Space Agency's Background Mission. Background Mission is about building uniform, global archives in support of RADARSAT-1 Program objectives of time- and site-specific data collections. Most of these objectives were met in the first five years of the nominal mission duration. An extended phase of Background Mission is under way, the most important element of which is a continuous four-season coverage of the Arctic Basin. This paper reports on the progress of this coverage campaign, which started in mid-2003, and has since been implemented uninterruptedly for summer, fall, winter and spring snapshots of the northern polar cap and a large area around it. It is expected that the systematic, sustained RADARSAT Background Mission coverage of the Arctic would result in valuable temporal records of a part of the world that is particularly sensitive to global climate change.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 25, 2005
Accession Number
ADA449935

Entities

People

  • Ahmed Mahmood

Organizations

  • Canadian Space Agency

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acquisition
  • Artificial Satellites
  • Boundaries
  • Data Acquisition
  • Geography
  • Glaciers
  • High Resolution
  • Ice
  • Monitoring
  • North America
  • Polar Cap
  • Polar Regions
  • Regions
  • Remote Sensing
  • Satellite Imaging
  • Sea Ice
  • Synthetic Aperture Radar

Fields of Study

  • Environmental science

Readers

  • Atmospheric Remote Sensing.
  • Irregular Warfare and Special Operations Cyberspace Operations against Adversarial Threats.
  • Polar and Arctic Studies

Technology Areas

  • Space
  • Space - Satellites
  • Space - Space Objects