Kinematic Remote Sensing

Most of this research focuses on dynamical systems, so we invest a lot of effort into making kinematic observations. Dynamics and kinematics go hand-in-hand, as kinematics is the study of motion while dynamics is the study of forces that drive that motion. We take advantage of a variety of remote sensing platforms and techniques to derive our kinematic observations, and our methods can be broadly grouped as interferometric (which entails differencing the phase of two electromagnetic waves recorded at different times) and feature tracking (where we cross-correlate images taken at different times to find the displacement of observed features). For our applications, interferometry can only be done with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data while feature tracking applies to SAR and optical imagery.

Research usually focuses on short-timescale variations in glacier flow velocity, so we place a premium on time-dependent kinematic observations. Such observations can inform our understanding of local and nonlocal dynamics, including changes in water pressure at the beds of glaciers and changes in resistive buttressing stresses from floating ice shelves. We are always looking for new data and new ways to extract detailed information about spatiotemporal variations in dynamical systems.