Ricerc@Sapienza

Glaciers are considered a reliable indicator of climate change being connected to global temperature and snow precipitation changes, farther the impact on glaciers health is a really important factor for the local hydrological cycle. Successful mitigation of the climate-related hydrological changes and their impacts on society therefore poses a pressing challenge, which calls for large-scale monitoring of glaciers and a better understanding of their dynamics. Due to lower cost and higher time-space resolution than in-situ surveys, remote sensing is now the most suitable technique for large-scale glacier monitoring. Among the parameters used for glacier monitoring, the glaciers surface velocity plays a crucial role, since it is impacted by several events connected to glaciers changes.
The aim of the research project consists in a feasibility study about the possibility to implement our software in the Google Earth Engine platform (GEE); it will requests a deep analysis of the characteristics of GEE and a study about the compatibility with the algorithm. In this way we will be able to implement in the future the off-set SAR tracking algorithm for glacier surface velocity analysis developed by the Geodesy and Geomatics Department of the University of Rome "La Sapienza" into this new infrastructure. This may be the basis for an innovative global glacier surface velocity monitoring service, not existing nowadays, which will automatically process Sentinel-1 imagery and estimate glacier surface velocity for all the monitored areas, providing fundamental benefit for glacier monitoring.