Arctic Peak Paper Published

Our paper on determining the highest mountain in the US Arctic using fodar was published today in the journal The Cryosphere.  The paper settles the issue of which peak is highest, resulting from discrepancies in the USGS maps made in the 1950s.  While determining the peak elevations is cool stuff, the real importance of the paper is that we validated that fodar is more accurate than any other airborne technique at measuring steep mountain topography.  Our results were within centimeters of ground measurements and our repeat airborne measurements revealed changes in snow thickness that had previously been impossible to measure on such steep, dangerous terrain.  Combined with our previous studies of snow depth on flat terrain and our coastal studies, we now have all the validation data we need to declare fodar the best thing since sliced bread and bags shaped like bottled beer in terms of cartography and the measurement of changes in topography on any spatial scale and any terrain type.

You can find a lot of background on the story and visualizations of the data here.  You can read the story behind the ground validation of the heights here.

The journal decided to issue a press release announcing the paper, and a quick internet search picked up these links related to the story:

gizmodo.com
phys.org
Science Daily
newser.com

You can fly around on the data in 3D in Fodar Earth and flying up to Arctic Alaska.

You can read the paper below, or download it here.

[pdfviewer width=”800px” height=”849px” beta=”false”]https://fairbanksfodar.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/tc-10-1245-2016.pdf[/pdfviewer]