Boulder, July 13, 2016

Tagged by: Ice

Ice-dam Failures Revealed with PlanetScope Data

Paper

Image above: PlanetScope image of ice-dam study site in Jokulsarlon, Iceland taken March 2, 2023. © 2023, Planet Labs PBC. All Rights Reserved. In icy environments, mountain lakes can be dammed not by just rock, but by long standing ice formations. But with the ongoing retreat of glaciers and icecaps around the […]

Planet Imagery Helps Find that Rapid Sediment Re-Deposition May Limit Carbon Release during Catastrophic Thermokast Lake Drainage

Paper

Arctic permafrost is the frozen ground in and around the arctic circle which holds mass amounts of soil organic carbon. But due to warming global temperatures, Arctic permafrost is beginning to unfreeze and degrade, releasing stored greenhouse gas emissions including carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. Within this landscape, thawing land, […]

Sub-daily Dove Imagery Used to Measure River Velocity

Paper

If it were possible, a stationary observer in sun synchronous orbit would see one Planet Dove satellite rocket past every ~90 seconds. At polar latitudes, the relative speed of Earth’s rotation is much lower, like the inside tracks of a vinyl record. As a result, Planet often collects multiple images of the […]

Change Detection in 3D: Generating Digital Elevation Models from Dove Imagery

Paper

Many communities live in mountainous or glaciated terrain, with a constant threat of landslides and avalanches. Remote sensing methods, including construction of digital elevation models (DEMs), have the potential to detect deformation of the Earth’s surface—not only horizontally, but also vertically. While active sensors like radar are excellent for detecting this 3D […]

Bigger, Faster Avalanches, Triggered by Climate Change

Features

In 2016, two glaciers in Tibet sheered down to their bed, erupting into avalanches. The first disaster killed nine people. A major study, published in Nature Geosciences, examined Planet imagery in the months leading up to the avalanches, and their aftermath. The work was subsequently featured in the The New York Times: “‘…it […]

Tracking Dynamic Changes in Northern Surface Waters

Paper

Using the Yukon Flats in Alaska as the test study area, Sarah Cooley and colleagues evaluated the potential scientific utility of the Planet Dove constellation for hydrologic modeling and research. The study concluded that Planet imagery can improve mapping and tracking changing inundation extent of hundreds of small, heterogeneous water bodies in […]

Extreme Flow Velocities and Formation of a Dammed Lake

Paper

Jakob Steiner and team use digital elevation models and Landsat imagery in combination with high resolution Planet data to quantify surface elevation changes and flow velocities during a glacial surge of the Khurdopin Glacier. They conclude that the high frequency of Planet imagery is useful to capture peak surge velocities that are […]