IceFRONT: Integration of Radar and Optical Images for Operational River Freeze-Up Monitoring

The objectives of the IceFRONT project are 1) to help hydropower companies to gather from satellite images, the timely information needed for operational river freeze-up monitoring and 2) to speed up and simplify the process of analyzing the satellite images and extracting the required information. The study is conducted on the Peace River (Alberta). The project has succeeded in developing an integrated automated approach to provide ice information from various sources of satellite data, based entirely on open source software. IceFRONT integrates optical (MODIS and LANDSAT-8) and radar (RADARSAT-2 and TERRASAR-X) images. The various approaches are described.