first day of laser scanning

It's hard to dress for a full day on the Franz Josef Glacier. We start in the valley, where it is quite warm and all you want to wear is a t-shirt and shorts. Then it's up a large ice-cored moraine, where you want to be wearing even less because it's a steep climb. Finally it's onto the ice with a wee bit of wind and cold air, where you want to be in full windproof layers. My technique thus far has been to wear my goretex pants, and unzip them for the hike up. It work fine, but I'm always a bit steamy on the way up. Today, in addition, I was wishing I had had my down jacket while I waited for the laser scanner.

We set up the laser scanner for the first time. The purpose of the laser scanner is to determine a high-resolution digital elevation model (DEM) of the study site. We need this for the two stereo-camera setup, so that we can calibrate and groundtruth the DEM we derive from that setup. The only problem is that our laser scanner is not actually a laser scanner, but rather a "total station." The main difference is that the total station scans points rather than swaths, and as a result it takes much longer to scan the same area. When it sends out a laser beam to a given location, it waits to receive that signal back to determine the distance. When it doesn't receive the signal back within a given time period, it times out and continues onto the next point. Unfortnately on ice the signal received by the laser scanner can often be oversaturated, and as a result it times out. It can take hours to scan just a couple hundred square meters.

Today I ran the laser scanner on the lower part of the Franz Josef near Arthur's Cataract (a large waterfall on the true left of the glacier). For a while, we tried to scan at incredibly high-resolution (1 m), and the scan said it was going to take 19 hours. We eventually switched the resolution to five meters, but only after I babysat the machine for about 3 hours. We are getting the data that we need from the total station, but it's a bit of a pain to wait for it.

Total station, which we are using to construct a DEM of certain areas of the glacier

Beautiful day on the glacier. View from the ice-cored moraine.