This M.Sc. thesis project aims at quantifying how well remotely sensed ground deformation captures the ice/water content of the active layer in different landforms/ground conditions. It will further be investigated if assimilating the remotely sensed ground deformation into the permafrost model CryoGrid improves the model performance on a local scale. The ground deformation will be derived using the Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) remote sensing method.
The fieldwork forms the base of this evaluation and in-situ observations of the frozen active layer ice content and the end-of-season active layer thickness will be collected at several sites in Adventdalen. The data will be compared to an InSAR timeseries to assess how well InSAR captures the thaw subsidence of the active layer and local differences in the ice/water content. The results from this assessment will be used to test if assimilating the InSAR subsidence into CryoGrid can improve the ice content representation of the active layer and uppermost permafrost in the model.