Description
- Abstract:
- The northern high latitudes are currently experiencing some of the fastest rates of environmental change on Earth, including reductions in sea ice extent, melting of glaciers and ice sheets, thawing of permafrost and intensification of the hydrologic cycle. Over the next few decades, these changes are expected to intensify and will have dramatic impacts not only on the people and environment of the Arctic, but also at a global-scale through sea level rise, permafrost-carbon feedbacks and sea ice-atmospheric circulation linkages. Research on Arctic environmental change has traditionally been limited by a tradeoff between high spatial and high temporal resolution satellite imagery. In the past few years, however, there has been rapid development in new satellite technologies including the launch of hundreds of CubeSats which now provide daily imagery of the entire Earth’s surface at 3 m resolution. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how these advances in technology combined with novel methodological approaches enable better understanding of dynamic Arctic environmental processes. In Chapter 1, I investigate processes controlling shorefast sea ice breakup through mapping shorefast ice breakup timing in MODIS imagery. I find that springtime air temperatures exert a dominant control on breakup timing and demonstrate that the coldest Arctic communities are likely to experience the greatest changes in breakup in the future. In Chapter 2, I assess whether CubeSat imagery can be used to map fine-scale changes in northern surface water dynamics. As one of the first scientific applications of CubeSat imagery, this work identifies key challenges associated with the imagery yet concludes that it has great potential for observing surface hydrology from space. Finally, Chapter 3 builds upon this work by tracking sub-seasonal changes in lake area using CubeSat imagery over much larger study areas in Northern Canada and Alaska. Through the development of a novel method that incorporates object-based lake-tracking and machine learning, this analysis identifies a surprisingly hydrologically dynamic landscape, with implications for estimating freshwater carbon emissions from northern water bodies. The insights revealed in this dissertation advance our understanding of Arctic environmental change and lay the framework for further investigations leveraging high temporal resolution satellite imagery.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2020
Access Conditions
- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
- All rights reserved. Collection is open to the Brown community for research.
Citation
Cooley, Sarah Whiting,
"New insights into Arctic environmental change from high-temporal resolution satellite remote sensing"
(2020).
Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:1129399/
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Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences department....