Discipline: Technology and Engineering
Subcategory: Environmental Engineering
Session: 2
Khaing Hsu Wai - LaGuardia Community College/ CUNY
Co-Author(s): Jessica Chiu,NOAA-CREST, The City College of New York, New York; Tarendra Lakhankar, NOAA-CREST, The City College of New York, New York; Nir Krakauer, NOAA-CREST, The City College of New York, New York; Nick Steiner, NOAA-CREST, The City College of New York, New York; Kyle McDonald, NOAA-CREST, The City College of New York, New York
Glacier melt over the Himalayan region influences input for hydrologic systems that feed many critical rivers and fisheries for downstream water supply and the hydropower generation. Shifts in seasonal Freeze/Thaw/Melt (F/T/M) cycles with a changing climate could affect up to billions of people who depend on the rivers of Nepal, India, China and Myanmar. Derived from the NASA Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) on EUMETSAT Metop-A and Metop-B satellites operating at 5.255 GHz (C-band), a daily F/T/M data is available based on vertically polarized (V-pol) backscatter measurements over seasonally frozen land and glacierized areas for the High Mountain Asia region. Soil moisture and temperature data were obtained from Third Pole Environment (TPE) database, a network of Chinese stations over the Tibetan Plateau. These ground soil moisture and temperature data are compared with the ASCAT satellite product over the period 2008 to 2016. Statistical analysis of the NASA ASCAT data compared with in-situ data is performed to validate the satellite-retrieval data, find trends, and quantify and characterize errors. NASA ASCAT data also is compared with the data from European Space Agency Sentinel-1 Satellites that uses the microwave C-band. Moreover, the accuracy of the scatterometer will be evaluated too for future research purposes. The goal of the project is to help predict seasonal soil freeze/thaw cycles, which can help study how climate change affects locations differently, and the far-reaching hydrologic impacts of changing snow cover, and improve modeling of future climate predictions.
Keywords: Satellite, Radar, ASCAT, SAR, Himalaya, River flow, Snow-melt, Soil moisture, Soil temperature, Air temperature
Funder Acknowledgement(s): This project is supported by the National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates (Grant # 1560050), under the direction of Dr. Reginald A. Blake, Dr. Janet Liou-Mark, and Ms. Laura Yuen-Lau. The author is grateful for the support from The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Cooperative Science Center for Earth System Sciences and Remote Sensing Technologies Summer Bridge program (Grant # NA16SEC4810008) under the direction of Dr. Reza Khanbilvardi and Dr. Shakila Merchant and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The author would like to give a special thanks to Jessica Chiu, Dr. Tarendra Lakhankar, Dr. Nir Krakauer, Dr. Kyle McDonald and Nick Steiner for their mentoring and guidance. The author is solely responsible for the content of this article, and it does not necessarily represent the views of the NSF or of NOAA-CREST.
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Tarendra Lakhankar, tlakhankar@ccny.cuny.edu
Role: I did every part of the research and my mentors who are my co-authors trained me and gave me guidance.