Impact of environmental, instrumental and data processing parameters on the performance of the Radar for Icy Moon Exploration

Il radar sounding è una tecnica molto promettente per la ricerca di ambienti abitabili sulle lune ghiacciate di Giove, poiché permetterà di osservare direttamente sotto la superficie fino a profondità di diversi chilometri. In questo lavoro si è seguita una metodologia basata sull'utilizzo di dati raccolti su terreni analoghi di altri corpi del sistema solare, per valutare l'impatto di alcuni parametri fondamentali sulle prestazioni di RIME (Radar for Icy Moon Exploration)

Subsurface Mapping of Deserts and Polar Regions Using Radar Data on Earth and Mars

There are abundant resources buried underground that are difficult to be investigated remotely. This thesis is concerned with the development and utility of various novel processing methods for different radar instruments in the field of subsurface mapping on Earth and Mars. Firstly, advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging and Interferometric SAR (InSAR) techniques are applied to assess their potential for revealing subsurface features in the eastern Sahara Desert. The radar penetration depth at L-band (1.25 GHz) is estimated to be 1-2 m over paleochannels in the Sahara Desert, given an initial assumption that radar penetration occurs in the sand accumulation areas. The L-band frequency of previous and existing spaceborne SAR mission is shown to limit the penetration depth to a few metres below the surface. However, over the terrestrial ice-sheets, a radar instrument, the Multi-Coherent Radar Depth Sounder (MCoRDS) from the NASA Operation Ice Bridge (OIB) mission, can penetrate the ice sheet down to 3 km, revealing extensive englacial layers. An automated layer tracing method based on the Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) and Hough Transform (HT) is proposed to detect and digitise these englacial layers in Greenland. The results show that this proposed method can restore at least 72% of the isochrones when compared with previous results. Given the research interests of the department and inspired by the similarity of the layering phenomenon between the Earth and Martian polar regions, the layer tracing method is adjusted and applied to SHAllow RADar (SHARAD) radargrams from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This method is demonstrated on the SHARAD data in Promethei Lingula as this 6 is the only region with coherent subsurface echo returns near the south pole, resulting in the extraction of six distinct subsurface interfaces, which record past depositional and erosional history and may be associated with past climate change on Mars

Spatial variability of aircraft-measured surface energy fluxes in permafrost landscapes

Arctic ecosystems are undergoing a very rapid change due to global warming and their response to climate change has important implications for the global energy budget. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how energy fluxes in the Arctic will respond to any changes in climate related parameters. However, attribution of these responses is challenging because measured fluxes are the sum of multiple processes that respond differently to environmental factors. Here, we present the potential of environmental response functions for quantitatively linking energy flux observations over high latitude permafrost wetlands to environmental drivers in the flux footprints. We used the research aircraft POLAR 5 equipped with a turbulence probe and fast temperature and humidity sensors to measure turbulent energy fluxes along flight tracks across the Alaskan North Slope with the aim to extrapolate the airborne eddy covariance flux measurements from their specific footprint to the entire North Slope. After thorough data pre-processing, wavelet transforms are used to improve spatial discretization of flux observations in order to relate them to biophysically relevant surface properties in the flux footprint. Boosted regression trees are then employed to extract and quantify the functional relationships between the energy fluxes and environmental drivers. Finally, the resulting environmental response functions are used to extrapolate the sensible heat and water vapor exchange over spatio-temporally explicit grids of the Alaskan North Slope. Additionally, simulations from the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model were used to explore the dynamics of the atmospheric boundary layer and to examine results of our extrapolation