Glacier Satellite
Glacial change is an important part of global change. Its evolutionary process directly reflects global climate change, and its data features high resolutions, a large amount of information, and high fidelity.
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Glacier Satellite
Glacial change is an important part of global change. Its evolutionary process directly reflects global climate change, and its data features high resolutions, a large amount of information, and high fidelity (Qin 1995; Qin and Kang 1997). Glaciers contain 69.5% of the freshwater resources on land. Global warming and glacial retreat over the years have resulted in a heavy loss of freshwater resources, caused geological disasters such as glacial floods, and posed a threat to humanity’s living environment. Glacial change has attracted more and more attention from domestic and foreign scholars since the middle of the last century. Continuing development of science and technology has provided a number of new methods for glacier observation since the beginning of the twenty-first century. With an Earth environment monitoring system consisting of space-based remote sensing, ground-based observation, and information systems, researchers have monitored glaciers using timely, long-term, three-dimensional, dynamic, and high resolution. Their research provides the informational and observational basis for understanding the overall behavior of glaciers and predicting future changes (Ye et al. 2002).
13.1 Scientific Challenges 13.1.1 Current Status and Challenges of Glacier Research Traditional glacier change research mainly used field observations and empirical formulas to find changes in the area, volume, and surface velocity of glaciers. The data acquired from traditional field observations are continuous and accurate, but have many limitations and require manpower and material resources. Wide-scale observations are impossible, and whether a typical glacier change has universal significance and whether it can symbolize the change trend of other glaciers is currently unknown. Therefore, scholars are in need of new means by which to monitor glacier change more quickly and on a larger scale (Zhang et al. 2010). © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 H. Guo et al., Scientific Satellite and Moon-Based Earth Observation for Global Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8031-0_13
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13 Glacier Satellite
With the development of space technology since the 1980s, researchers have become more and more interested in satellite remote sensing data. The use of remote sensing to research glacier properties and characteristics and in monitoring the dynamic changes of glaciers has become an important trend in glaciological studies, which not only makes up for the disadvantages of traditional observation measures but also effectively solves the problem of limited data for mountainous areas in glacier research (Li et al. 1998). Plate 13.1 shows the use of ASTER images to acquire velocity diagrams of glacial movement. In addition to optical remote sensing data, radar data have also been widely applied in glacier change research due to their unique advantages (Willis et al. 2012). They not only satisfactorily increase the applicability of conventional methods, but also make up for the susceptibility of optical
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