Tom Hirose Paris Vachon

Noetix Research Inc. Canada Centre for Remote Sensing

978 Merivale Road Natural Resources Canada

Ottawa, Ontario 588 Booth St.

K1Z 6A4 Ottawa, Ontario

CANADA K1A 0Y7

CANADA

Canada's northwest passage is located in the Arctic Archipelago and serves as an important shipping corridor for transporting minerals and oil out of the north and as a resupply route for northern coastal communities. Shipping begins after ice break-up and continues until freeze-up.

Ice bridges form between the Arctic Islands during freeze-up and remain consolidated until the spring thaw. It is well known that the consolidated ice weakens during the spring period due to an increase in air temperature. This period is followed by a break-up of the ice which is discharged into the open waters of Baffin Bay. It is hypothesized that the weakening of the ice will result in micro-movement of the ice (eg. fractures and vertical displacement due to tidal activity) and can be detected using tandem mode interferometry. If this is correct, interferometry may become a useful a tool for the early detection of ice break-up.

In order to test our hypothesis, a time series of tandem mode image pairs have been processed over Resolute Channel, NWT from October 1995 through to May 1996. Coherence and phase products were generated for each pair. The results show the temporal evolution of the land fast ice. Fractures across the ice bridges and vertical motion from tides near the shoreline are detected using a 24 hour time separation. The termination of the ERS 1/2 tandem phase, however, did not enable us to observe the break-up of the ice.

Keywords: ESA European Space Agency - Agence spatiale europeenne, observation de la terre, earth observation, satellite remote sensing, teledetection, geophysique, altimetrie, radar, chimique atmospherique, geophysics, altimetry, radar, atmospheric chemistry