Airborne Scanning

Laser Monitoring of Ice Elevations and Sea-Ice-Thickness, Greenland 10.05.2005

A low-cost Twin-Otter based laser altimetry and scanning system have been set up by KMS in several different commercial aircraft, and flown extensively in connection with airborne gravity activities in the Arctic Ocean north of Greenland, as well as on various research projects on the ice sheet and coastal glaciers in Greenland. The hardware system is based on a Riegl laser swath scanner combined with numerous GPS receivers. Roll and pitch are provided by either a medium-grade commercial INS or a low-cost custom-made IMU with fiber-optics gyros. The whole system is designed for useon non-dedicated aircraft, with a minimum of set-up time. In the paper we outline the hardware setup, processing schemes and give some examples of field campaigns and estimated accuracies. Measurements over sea-ice in the Polar Sea north of Greenland have shown that sea-ice freeboard can readily be measured combining laser altimetry and a local geoid model, yielding an indirect measurement of sea-ice thickness.