Abstract
Ice shelves fringe much of the Antarctic continent, and, despite being up to 2 km thick, are vulnerable to climate change. Owing to their role in helping to control the ice sheet contribution to sea level change there is great interest in measuring the rate at which they are melting into the ocean. This study describes the development and deployment of an ice-penetrating phase-sensitive FMCW radar, sufficiently robust and with sufficiently low-power consumption to be run through the Antarctic winter as a standalone instrument, yet with the stability and mm-precision needed to detect the very slow changes in ice shelf thickness in this exceptionally demanding environment. A number of elegant processing techniques are described to achieve reliable, high-precision performance and results presented on field data obtained from the Larsen-C ice shelf, Antarctica.
Highlights
Concern is growing that the ability to predict future sea level rise is being compromised by the inability to predict the discharge of ice from the Antarctic ice sheet into the ocean
The pRES instrument has since been applied to ground-based ice sheets, to track internal layers to learn more about the dynamics of ice flow
A further difficulty with pRES is that the power consumption of the network analyser is high and a petrol-generator is required in order to operate the instrument
Summary
Concern is growing that the ability to predict future sea level rise is being compromised by the inability to predict the discharge of ice from the Antarctic ice sheet into the ocean. The pRES instrument has since been applied to ground-based ice sheets, to track internal layers to learn more about the dynamics of ice flow This system, suffers from a number of limitations. A further difficulty with pRES is that the power consumption of the network analyser is high and a petrol-generator is required in order to operate the instrument. In view of the enormous potential of pRES, a purpose-built radar system (the subject of this paper) is under development, optimised for this application This system has similar range resolution performance to pRES, it has far lower noise figure and power consumption, allowing the possibility of year-round operation from a modest set of batteries and solar panel.
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