Conference Agenda

The Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the global average, making climate change’s polar effects more intense than anywhere else in the world. The Arctic accounts for half of the organic carbon stored in soils. There is high confidence that the thaw of terrestrial permafrost will lead to carbon release, but only low confidence regarding timing, magnitude and relative role of CO2 versus CH4. There is general consensus that these issues can be tackled through support by satellite observations, but this has not been fully exploited to date. The recently inaugurated NASA-ESA Arctic Methane and Permafrost Challenge (AMPAC) strives to address these questions inter alia through making use of synergistic measurements, activities to improve satellite retrievals with a clear focus on high latitudes, and promoting new dedicated satellite sensors as well as improving validation of existing and upcoming satellite missions.

The objectives are to evaluate the capability of P-band SAR to support AMPAC, specifically for wetland and freeze/thaw dynamics monitoring. Results will support the discussion on gaps of current and future missions for the purpose of AMPAC, continuing Bartsch et al. (2025). Requirements towards recent and future missions will be presented and preliminary results will be discussed depending on BIOMASS mission data availability.

Bartsch, A., Gay, B.A., Schüttemeyer, D., Malina, E., Miner, K. Grosse, G. , Fix, A., Tamminen, J., Bösch, H., Parker, R. J., Rautiainen, K., Hashemi, J., Miller, C. E: "Advancing the Arctic Methane Permafrost Challenge (AMPAC) With Future Satellite Missions," in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, vol. 18, pp. 6279-6298, 2025a, doi: 10.1109/JSTARS.2025.3538897