Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2016) 131: 384
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/i2016-16384-y

Regular Article

SAR observations of the Nansen Ice Shelf fracture

¹ UNAM, Fac. Ingenieria, Dept. Telecomm., Mexico City, Mexico
² ISAC-CNR, Bologna, Italy

^* e-mail: mmoctezumaf@hotmail.com

Received: 26 May 2016
Accepted: 7 October 2016
Published online: 4 November 2016

Abstract

This paper presents a study, by means of of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images, of the fracture of the Nansen Ice Shelf, from its first appearance in SAR images to the final collapse on 7 April 2016. Both Sentinel-1 and Cosmo-SkyMed images have been used. First, the images were remapped onto an equidistant cylindrical projection; from these a subset, or imagette, only covering the fracture was extracted. A segmentation scheme was then applied to the sequence of imagettes in order to produce a sequence of binary imagettes with only the fracture area enhanced; from these, the computation of fracture area became a trivial task.