John Wessels, Senior SAR Scientist at PCI Geomatics, discusses water and ice mapping tools. He describes the process of delineating, extracting and mapping small bodies of water in a SAR image. He also discusses the challenges involved, such as high wind speeds making it difficult to clearly determine the threshold between land and water.
He briefly overviews the ice mapping process, including orthorectifying SAR data sets, and classifying pixels within water polygons as water, ice or unknown. This process is useful to determine when lakes are more than ninety percent ice, and to acquire information about climate change.
This presentation was a part of the Alberta Terrestrial Imaging Centre LiDAR/SAR Wetland and Water Monitoring Workshop in June of 2014. The Alberta Land-use Knowledge Network was able to record many of the presentations.