Thursday 22 April 2010, 11:30 AM (AAD Theatrette)

Natalia Galin

2009 visiting Fulbright scholar at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Thickness Estimation Over Antarctic Sea Ice Using Helicopter Borne 2-8 GHz FMCW Radar

Abstract: In her talk she will be presenting an overview of her dissertation work, which will summarise on the motivation for snow thickness estimation, the operation and performance of the FMCW radar from a helicopter platform (the design of the radar is the product of the expertise at the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, Kansas University, and was loaned to the Australian Antarctic Division), the necessary conditions for unambiguous detection of the air/snow and snow/ice interface, and the signal processing method designed to correct for systematic error in the radar to allow for high resolution operation. To conclude, the first validated results of snow thickness extraction from an airborne FMCW radar over sea ice will be presented.

Bio: Natalia Galin graduated with Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from University of New South Wales in 2006, earning first class honors with her project "Hardware Implementation of the Discrete Wavelet Transform for JPEG2000", which at the time was one of the fastest and most memory efficient DWT architectures in published literature. Natalia's interest in the study of the Earth's climate and what factors affect it and how, led her to pursue a PhD in helping understand the very important role that sea ice plays in this process. The significance of sea ice on global climate is only just being recognised and an accurate assessment of snow depth covering this ice is needed to enable researchers to determine the depth of the sea ice itself. Subsequently, in addition to learning the geophysical aspects of snow and sea ice, it is this "Snow Thickness Estimation Over Antarctic Sea Ice Using Helicopter Borne 2-8 GHz FMCW Radar" which forms the main aim of Natalia's PhD. After two trips to East Antarctic where she flew RAASTI (RAdar for Antarctic Snow Thickness Investigation) over sea ice to study its snow cover, she spent 2009 as a visiting Fulbright scholar at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center.