This award is for support for a two year collaborative program for the development of data cumu-lation, as a technique to further exploit the favorable characteristics (in particular its high radio-metric sensitivity) of the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensor data for mapping surface features on the polar ice sheets. The work will focus on the quantification of local surface relief and on the refinement of existing topographic data over the two focus areas of Green-land and Antarctica. Although no field work is proposed here, this work is potentially important to anticipated field activity in northeast Greenland, the Siple Coast ice streams and the ice divide area in West Antarctica. Characterization of the morphology and ice dynamics of the interior of large ice sheets is an important component of site selection for deep ice-core drilling.
