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.
These work may be used for the establishment of an innovative global glacier surface velocity monitoring service. A web platform will be developed, including a Web Processing Service that will automatically process Sentinel imagery and calculate glacier surface velocity for all the monitored areas. It is important to underline that a worldwide glacier tracking velocity service using SAR data is currently not available; it would represent a fundamental benefit for glacier monitoring, providing near real-time monitoring capabilities across the globe, without having to organize expensive, logistically challenging and potentially dangerous in-situ expeditions. The open-source approach guarantees low operating costs and enables us to have a basic service available for free on a global scale.
Thus it is not certainly a case that NASA, during International NASA Space App held in Rome on April 2016, awarded the Italian ICECream Team with the Galactic Impact worldwide prize for their L.I.V.E. Glacier Project, that is based on the scientific results obtained with our algorithm.