| ABOUT Arctic Tourism's PRODUCTS |
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| New Venue Service |
| A custom service that provides a historical analysis of environmental conditions in the clients area of interest for assessing its suitability as a new venue of operation.
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| Floe edge mapping using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image |
| A SAR instrument operates in microwave range. It emits pulsed miscrowave signals to a target, and measures the backscattered signal from the target. Since it is an active system that does not rely on solar radiation, images can be acquired at both day and night times. And because microwave can penetrate clouds, it also has the capability to acquire earth surface images at cloudy conditions. This all-time all-weather capability of SAR is advantageous over optical sensors, for which data acquisition is considerably limited by weather conditions.
SAR is sensitive to the changes in target dielectric properties, which is related with the water content, and to the geometric characteristics of the target.
The interaction of radar signal with the ice-air boundary as well as the inhomogeneous ice volume makes SAR a useful tool for the measurements of some ice parameters. It is ideal for timely monitoring of sea ice due to its ability to map ice parameters at both day and night regardless of weather condition. Products posted on this website are floe edge locations mapped from SAR imagery acquired by RADARSAT or ENVISAT ASAR. The figure below is an example.
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| MODIS High Resolution RGB Image |
| MODIS is an optical sensor on board NASA’s polar orbit satellites terra and aqua, which provides daily global coverage. The composite color images posted on this site are generated using images of three MODIS channels. MODIS Channels 2, 1 and 4 are used as R, G, B channels, respectively. This combination uses the two channels with the highest pixel resolution, 250 m, to keep the best spatial information. Channel 4 is re-sampled to 250 m from its original 500 m pixel resolution to match this higher resolution. The images are provided in geotiff format. The MODIS color images posted here provide a visual material for the upper ocean waters, coastal zones, and land areas. An example of the product is shown below. |
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| MODIS SST |
| Sea Surface Temperature (SST) maps posted on this website are derived from the infrared channels of the MODIS image using a split-window algorithm. Only temperature over liquid water surface is estimated and color coded. Two masks are applied on the maps: areas masked with dark color represent land, and areas masked with white color represent cloud and ice. The water temperature is coded using a fixed scale bar, in celsius degree. The product is generated in 500 m pixel size. The format of this product is also geotiff.
An example SST map is shown below. |
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| Ice Climotology Product |
| The Ice Interpretation products provide information regarding surface ice conditions relevant to over ice navigation derived from SAR, MODIS, and AMSR-E. Surface roughness, open water (leads), ridges, and state of melt are some of the features of interest
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| Pack Ice Product |
| The pack ice edge product delineates the pack ice edge and open water mapped from SAR or MODIS imagery.
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| Ice Motion Product |
| The Ice Motion service provides sea ice motion velocity from time sequential imagery.
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| Wind Retrieval Service |
| SAR imagery has successfully demonstrated its ability to retrieve field of wind speed from fully calibrated radar cross section providing the wind direction is either estimated from the image itself (wind rows, relief shadowing) or given by ancillary data (models, scatterometry).
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| Short Term Outlook Service |
| The Short Term Outlook service provides the subscriber with 24-48 hour outlooks of the weather, sea ice, and ocean conditions on a daily basis during their period of operation over their location.
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