CoAuthors

Megha Maheshwari (Space Applications Centre (ISRO), India); Raj Kumar Kamaljit Singh (Space Applications Centre (ISRO), India); Dhani Ram Rajak (Space Applications Centre (ISRO), India); Jayaprasad P. (Space Applications Centre (ISRO), India); Rashmi Sharma (Space Applications Centre (ISRO), India)

Baikal Lake of Siberia is the World's deepest and largest lake containing 20 percent of World's unfrozen fresh water. Recent studies have shown the sign of warming in past few decades. These climatic and local changes affect the lake ice phenology, which is represented by the timing of freeze-up and break-up and the duration of the ice cover. We have utilized the Saral-AltiKa Sigma-0 data to assess the phenology of the ice cover in the study region. The growth and decay pattern of lake ice cover is very well peaked by the variations in Sigma-0. Early stage of thin ice cover has been identified by using the MODIS surface reflectance product. Thin sea ice thickness has been derived using the MODIS thermal data for thin ice cover and for thicker layer AltiKa data was used to get the estimate of ice thickness. Data available since the launch of AltiKa were utilized to investigate the inter-annual changes observed in the ice phenology. Results demonstrate the capability of AltiKa data in studying the lake ice phenology to assess the impact of changing climate.