Last week, Sebastian Buchelt and Jakob Schwalb-Willmann traveled to Longyearbyen, Svalbard, for a teaching stay on the high-arctic island hosted by the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS). Sebastian taught a three-day block course on UAV remote sensing of the cryosphere as part of the international UNIS Master’s course “Remote Sensing of the Cryosphere”, led by Assoc. Prof. Eero Rinne.
The course combined classroom sessions on flight regulations, data georeferencing and processing, and platform and sensor types with practical training in mission preparation and planning. On the second day, under surprisingly decent weather conditions and despite a former hurricane out in the Arctic Sea, the 20 students went together with our two lecturers Sebastian and Jakob to Longyearbreen, a glacier about an hour’s walk above Longyearbyen. Together, they acquired high-resolution UAV imagery to study surface temperature variations, melt channel features, and snow cover. Eero Rinne (many thanks for hosting us!) and guest lecturer Andy Kääb from University of Oslo joined us in the field and shared valuable insights and detailed explanations about the current state of the glacier as well as ongoing changes due to climate change. Back from the field, Sebastian processed the data into orthomosaics and digital elevation models (DEMs) until late so that students could analyze and compare the results with data acquired last year.
In the analysis session the next day, the students detected that the glacier has lost about 2 m in elevation, identified that the terminus has retreated by about 10m and that the meltwater channels have strongly widened since last year. Using recognizable features such as larger blocks on the glacier surface, the students could also quantify the velocity to about 1m per year. Thereby, they got a hands-on impression about the capabilities of UAV data – data that they had just acquired the day before.
This guest lecture during the research and teaching stay on the high-arctic island has been part of the University of Würzburg’s collaboration initiatives in the High Arctic.. The Earth Observation Research Cluster’s (EORC) teaching and research on Svalbard are coordinated by the EORC UAV team and are focusing on investigating high-arctic surface dynamics and their links to ecosystem processes. In this context, not only our researchers, but also several of our EAGLE MSc. students have been staying on Svalbard in recent years, e.g. to conduct internships, small research projects or even their Master theses.
We highly appreciate the invitation of our guest lecturers to teach at UNIS and are looking forward to collaborate in teaching and research activities in the time ahead!
