• Atmosphere
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.277-288
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• 2016

Polar lows are intense mesoscale cyclones that mainly occur over the sea in polar regions. Owing to their small spatial scale of a diameter less than 1000 km, simulating polar lows is a challenging task. At King Sejong station in West Antartica, polar lows are often observed. Despite the recent significant climatic changes observed over West Antarctica, adequate validation of regional simulations of extreme weather events such as polar lows are rare for this region. To address this gap, simulation results from a recent version of the Polar Weather Research and Forecasting model (Polar WRF) covering Antartic Peninsula at a high horizontal resolution of 3 km are validated against near-surface meteorological observations. We selected a case of high wind speed event on 7 January 2013 recorded at Automatic Meteorological Observation Station (AMOS) in King Sejong station, Antarctica. It is revealed by in situ observations, numerical weather prediction, and reanalysis fields that the synoptic and mesoscale environment of the strong wind event was due to the passage of a strong mesoscale polar low of center pressure 950 hPa. Verifying model results from 3 km grid resolution simulation against AMOS observation showed that high skill in simulating wind speed and surface pressure with a bias of $-1.1m\;s^{-1}$ and -1.2 hPa, respectively. Our evaluation suggests that the Polar WRF can be used as a useful dynamic downscaling tool for the simulation of Antartic weather systems and the near-surface meteorological instruments installed in King Sejong station can provide invaluable data for polar low studies over West Antartica.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.281-287
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• 2015

Two mini neutron monitors are installed at Concordia research station (Dome C, Central Antarctica, $75^{\circ}06^{\prime}S$, $123^{\circ}23^{\prime}E$, 3,233 m.a.s.l.). The site has unique properties ideal for cosmic ray measurements, especially for the detection of solar energetic particles: very low cutoff rigidity < 0.01 GV, high elevation and poleward asymptotic acceptance cones pointing to geographical latitudes > $75^{\circ}S$. The instruments consist of a standard neutron monitor and a "bare" (lead-free) neutron monitor. The instrument operation started in mid-January 2015. The barometric correction coefficients were computed for the period from 1 February to 31 July 2015. Several interesting events, including two notable Forbush decreases on 17 March 2015 and 22 June 2015, and a solar particle event of 29 October 2015 were registered. The data sets are available at cosmicrays.oulu.fi and nmdb.eu.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.21-28
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• 2012

In this study, detection of icebergs that have various scattering characteristics around Wilkinson glacier in West Antarctica is investigated using C-band fully-polarimetric RADARSAT-2 SAR data. Various polarimetric analyses including Freeman-Durden decomposition, H/A/$\bar{\alpha}$ decomposition, entropy (H) and anisotropy (A) method, and Wishart unsupervised classification, were applied for the RADARSAT-2 data used in this study. The polarimetric decomposition methods were successfully classified most of the iceberg, yet some iceberg with similar intensity of volume and surface scattering as sea ice were indistinguishable. Unsupervised classification with a combination of the polarimetric parameter, [1-H][1-A], gave a possibility to distinguish those unclassified iceberg.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.535-542
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• 2011

We extracted a surface displacement map of Canisteo Peninsula and the surrounding area in West Antarctica by applying 4-pass DInSAR technique to two ERS-1/2 tandem pairs and analyzed the surface displacement of glaciers and sea ice. In the displacement map, glaciers showed fast motion pushing the adjoining land-fast sea ice which has the displacement in the same direction as the glacier. Cosgrove ice shelf showed large displacement pushing the adjoining land-fast sea ice as well. Some sea ice indicated the displacement that is opposite to the land-fast sea ice. This was because the type of the sea ice is drift ice that is affected by ocean current. Therefore, we could confirmed the boundary between land-fast sea ice and drift ice. It was difficult to distinguish ice shelf from ice sheet because they showed similarities both in brightness of the SAR images and in fringe rates of the interferograms. However, a boundary between fast-moving ice shelf and stable ice sheet was easily confirmed in the displacement map after the phase unwrapping process.

• Ocean and Polar Research
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.9-20
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• 2003

A solar radiation model was used to investigate the UV radiation at the surface offing Sejong Station in West Antarctica. The results calculated by this model were compared with the values measured by UV-Biometer and UV-A meter during 1999-2000. In this study, the parameterization of solar radiative transfer process was based on Chou and Lee(1996). The total ozone amounts measured by Breve. Ozone Spectrophotometer and the aerosol amounts by Nakajima et al.(1996) was used as the input data of the solar radiative transfer model. And the surface albedo is assumed to be 0.20 in summer and 0.85 in winter. The sensitivity test of solar radiative transfer model was done with the variation of total ozone, aerosol amount, and surface albedo. When the cosine of solar zenith angle is 0.3, Erythemal UV-B radiation decreased 73% with the 200% increase of total ozone from 100 DU to 300 DU, but the decrease of UV-A radiation is about 1%. Also, for the same solar zenith angle, UV-A radiation was decreased 31.0% with the variation of aerosol optical thickness from 0.0 to 0.3 and Erythemal UV-B radiation was decreased only 6.1%. The increase of Erythemal W-B radiation with the variation of surface albedo was twice that of UV-A increase. The surface Erythemal UV-B and UV-A radiation calculated by solar raditive transfer model were compared with the measured values fer the relatively clear day at King Sejong Station in West Antarctica. The model calculated Erythemal UV-B radiation at the surface coincide well with the measured values except for cloudy days. But the difference between the model calculated UV-A radiation and the measured value at the surface was large because of cloud scattering effect. So, the cloud property data is needed to calculate the UV radiation more exactly at King Sejong Station in West Antarctica.

• Proceedings of the Petrological Society of Korea Conference
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• 2009.05a
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• pp.87-87
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• 2009

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2008.10a
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• pp.414-417
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• 2008

We have extracted a surface deformation map of a part of Canisteo Peninsula on Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica by applying 4-pass DInSAR technique to two ERS-1/2 tandem pairs obtained on October 21-22, 1995 (diff-pair) and March 9-10, 1996 (topo-pair), and analyzed changes of glaciers, sea ice, ice shelves, and their kinematic interactions. We observed fast motion of glaciers pushing the adjoining sea ice. Some interferometric phases indicate the up-rise of sea ice of which type is thought to be land-fast ice to exert repulsive force against the pushing glacier. There were other glaciers and sea ice that moved to the same direction, suggesting that the sea ice in these regions was land-fast ice weakly harnessed to sea bottom or pack ice not harnessed at all. Several small circular fringes in ice shelves suggested that islands or seamounts on the bottom of ice shelves deterred the movement of ice shelves, resulting in the rise of ice surface.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.17-24
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• 2018

Grounding line of a glacier or ice shelf where ice bottom meets the ocean is sensitive to changes in the polar environment. Recent rapid changes of grounding lines have been observed especially in southwestern Antarctica due to global warming. In this study, ERS-1/2 and Sentinel-1A Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image were interferometrically acquired in 1996 and 2015, respectively, to monitor the movement of the grounding line in the western part of Ronne Ice Shelf near the Antarctic peninsula. Double-Differential Interferometric SAR (DDInSAR) technique was applied to remove gravitational flow signal to detect grounding line from the interferometric phase due to the vertical displacement of the tide. The result showed that ERS-1/2 grounding lines are almost consistent with those from Rignot et al. (2011) which used the similar dataset, confirming the credibility of the data processing. The comparison of ERS-1/2 and Sentinle-1A DDInSAR images showed a grounding line retreat of $1.0{\pm}0.1km$ from 1996 to 2015. It is also proved that the grounding lines based on the 2004 MODIS Mosaic of Antarctica (MOA) images and digital elevation model searching for ice plain near coastal area (Scambos et al., 2017), is not accurate enough especially where there is a ice plain with no tidal motion.

• Ocean and Polar Research
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• v.44 no.1
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• pp.83-97
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• 2022

The Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica is one of the most affected regions by climate change, but it is one of the least studied realms due to difficulties in access. Korea Polar Research Institute (KOPRI) launched a research project in the Amundsen Sea in 2010 using the icebreaker research vessel (IBRV) Araon and has been conducting various research initiatives. In this paper, previous researches derived from the Amundsen Sea Embayment by Korean researchers are introduced. Through previous studies, researchers have been able to interpret the environmental and biogeochemical changes according to the inflow Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) and provide information for climate models. In particular, researches using radiocarbon isotopes (¹⁴C) were introduced to understand the physical and biogeochemical mechanisms of the carbon cycle in the Amundsen Sea. Opportunely, with the construction of a second icebreaker research vessel, the direction for systematic and long-term polar data acquisition can be presented.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.343-353
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• 2018

Ocean tides in Antarctica are not well constrained mostly due to the lack of tidal observations. Especially, tides underneath and around ice shelves are uncertain. InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) data has been used to observe ice shelf movements primarily caused by ocean tides. Here, we demonstrate that it is possible to estimate tidal constituents underneath the Sulzberger ice shelf, West Antarctica, solely using ERS-1/2 tandem mission DInSAR (differential InSAR) observations. In addition, the tidal constituents can be estimated in a high-resolution (~200 m) grid which is beyond any tidal model resolution. We assume that InSAR observed ocean tidal heights can be derived after correcting the InSAR data for the effect of atmospheric loading using the inverse barometric effect, solid earth tides, and ocean tide loading. The ERS (European Remote Sensing) tandem orbit configuration of a 1-day separation between SAR data takes diminishes the sensitivity to major tidal constituents including $K_1$ and $S_2$. Here, the dominant tidal constituent $O_1$ is estimated using 8 differential interferograms underneath the Sulzberger ice shelf. The resulting tidal constituent is compared with a contemporary regional tide model (CATS2008a) and a global tide model (TPXO7.1). The InSAR estimated tidal amplitude agrees well with both models with RMS (root-mean-square) differences of < 2.2 cm and the phase estimate corroborating both tide models to within $8^{\circ}$. We conclude that fine spatial scale (~200 m) Antarctic ice shelf ocean tide determination is feasible for dominant constituents using C-band ERS-1/2 tandem mission InSAR.