Principal Investigator Brent Minchew
Project Website https://glaciers.mit.edu/research/hazards
A portion of our research involves developing methods for applying existing remote sensing assets to hazard response and mitigation. To date, most of our work in this realm has focused on applications of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data to marine oil spill and wildfire response. Radar is well-suited for these applications because it is an all-weather, all-lighting instrument that is capable of locating oil on the sea surface, within bays, and along wetland coast. And our work has shown that it is possible to glean some characteristics of the spilled oil from PolSAR data. We have also shown that PolSAR data can be used to locate the perimeters of wildfires, under certain conditions.