Dott.ssa Mozhgan Zahriban Hesari

Abstract  

The cryosphere includes far more than the sea ice and icebergs that move through polar waters. It also encompasses the extensive ice tongues, coastal glaciers, and frozen coastal areas that extend from land into the ocean. These places are always changing. Their shifts affect the global climate, hold clues about past environmental conditions, and shape ecosystems on land and in the sea. Understanding how these frozen regions behave is crucial for tracking climate change, refining estimates of sea-level rise, and ensuring safe work and travel in polar and coastal areas.

Due to the harsh environment characterising polar regions, including inaccessibility, adverse weather conditions as frequent rain, snow and significant cloud coverage, and limited solar illumination, spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) represents a valuable and irreplaceable observation tool that allows getting information on a large scale at fine spatial resolution with sub-weekly temporal coverage.

During the seminar, several showcases will be presented to emphasise the potential of time-series of dual-polarimetric Sentinel-1 SAR measurements, which are provided free of charge from the European Space Agency through the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem, to address meaningful tasks. They include a robust and effective unsupervised detection and morphological tracking of icebergs and ice fronts belonging to ice tongues and marine-terminated continental glaciers.

The goal is to show how it is possible to get useful information from SAR imagery collected over the cryosphere and the role played by partial polarimetric information to support a continuous and updated observation of polar regions.

Biography:

Mozhgan Zahriban Hesari (Student Member, IEEE) was born in Gorgan, Iran, in 1989. She received her M.Sc. in Natural Resources Engineering from Sari Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources University, Iran, in 2014, and she is currently completing her Ph.D. in Information and Communication Technology and Engineering at the Università degli Studi di Napoli “Parthenope” in Naples, Italy.

She has authored several peer-reviewed papers and has presented her work at major international conferences, including IGARSS, the Living Planet Symposium, and IEEE MetroSea. She also carried out a visiting research period at the University of Twente, where she worked on SAR-based approaches for environmental monitoring.

She is a member of IEEE GRSS and IEEE OES, and she serves as a reviewer for scientific journals. Her research focuses on the use of multi-polarization synthetic aperture radar measurements for studying the oceans, cryosphere, and coastal environments.