Satellite photograph mosaics of Greenland from the 1960s era

This paper presents two mosaics of Greenland compiled from Declassified Intelligence Photography Project (DISP) data acquired in 1962 and 1963. The first mosaic consists of 24 orthorectified images from eight orbits acquired during the ARGON 9034A mission ( the first generation of reconnaissance satellite system) in May 1962. The second mosaic consists of 36 orthorectified images from 14 orbits acquired during the ARGON 9058A mission in October 1963. We discuss techniques used to address challenges arising from film-record quality and satellite navigation information. These techniques include adaptive filtering, bright strip removal, radiometric balancing, geometric rectification, quality control, mosaic post-processing. We estimate the relative geolocation accuracy, as compared to a 1992 ERS Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) mosaic, to be about 200m and the absolute accuracy to be about 450m. We show that this is sufficient to make quantitative comparisons in ice sheet extent over a 30 year interval.