Studies of another type of coastal zone

Studies of another type of coastal zone

The purpose of the presentation is to report on remote sensing and other activities in Nares Strait, a narrow 500-km throughway between Ellesmere Island and Greenland. The Strait is carrying a great amount of sea ice that drifts from Lincoln Sea (the Arctic Ocean) to Baffin Bay subject to wind, current and tides. Two active glaciers calve into the Strait.

The long-term studies and monitoring are part of the International Polar Year (IPY) exploiting various remote sensing data, foremost the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar on the European satellite ENVISAT. They are complemented with data from the Canadian RADARSAT and optical sensors such as MERIS on ENVISAT and MODIS on the NASA AQUA and TERRA satellites, cloud cover and sunlight permit. In principle, radar observations at moderate spatial resolution are made daily with occasional acquisitions at shorter intervals and exploited for drift pattern analysis.

The studies are supported by a programme of drifting buoys deployed in Lincoln Sea and in Nares Strait reporting positions at 20-minute intervals. The data complement radar observations revealing fine-scale drift patterns that reflect the influence of the large tides prevailing in the region.

Also, the studies are supported be meteorological modelling with a grid size of six km operated on an hourly basis at six points along the coast of Ellesmere Island. Recently, a standard automatic weather station was installed on Hans Island, a small island in the very middle of the region, revealing half-hourly data of temperature, wind and air pressure year round.

The presentation will give a brief overview of the methods of analysis applied with examples of data acquired and results derived from them.