Annual report and a new roadmap

Here is the annual report.

Conclusions from Pilot Project

The exploratory effort suggests that SAR is not an appropriate tool for looking at ice road crossings on rivers, as these features are simply too fine-scale to be studied from Satellite-based SAR. However, information inferred from the SAR imagery of lakes (such as freezing rates/ice growth) may be transferable to the rivers, to some degree.

The way forward

The direction for this study of the impact of ice road crossing on river breakup/discharge has been revised to focus on developing geo-referenced databases to model ice growth in rivers and its relevance to fish passage and overwintering. Our initial assessment is that while satellite-based SAR imagery may not be directly useful for looking at anything but the main channel of the largest rivers, some of the information that can be inferred about ice growth on the lakes could carry over to the rivers and be used to parameterize an ice model there.

The ultimate goal of this work is to develop tools for use in ice road route planning and site prioritization for on-the-ground monitoring. Achieving this goal may include developing a model for river ice and the impact of ice road crossings. Additionally, the following geospatial datasets should be developed for the domain of interest:

1. Climatology and extremes of temperature and snow forcing layer in GIS
2. FDD ‘felt’ by water bodies GIS layer for climatology/extreme years
3. Ice thickness layer in GIS
4. Bathymetry layer in GIS
5. Estimated overwintering habitat in GIS
6. Error estimates associated with each of the above layers

Another key component of this analysis may be planning additional data collection such as river ice depth and river bathymetry from Lidar, as well as assembling historical data on snow depth, etc. from disparate sources.

Finally, the most effective pursuit of the goals outlined here will be to coordinate with the activities of several groups conducting related studies. These include Ben Jones (USGS), Chris Arp (USGS), and Guido Grosse (UAF), who are working on assessing lake characteristics in NPR-A, Dan White (UAF), Bill Schnabel (UAF), Peter Prokein (UAF), Tom Logan (ARSC), and Celine Van Breukelen (UAF), who are building an automated tool to assess freshwater availability, and NSSI/GINA who are interested in building a database of lake properties for the North Slope at large.