The focus of this thesis is the application of multipolarization SAR data for characterization of marine oil spills and other low backscatter ocean phenomena. A variety of SAR descriptors are investigated for the purpose of discriminating between oil spills and look-alikes. The effects of various parameters on the imaging, including sensor frequency, imaging geometry and oil properties, are addressed. ...

Circulation and exchange processes at high-latitude ocean margins are investigated in this thesis, by using analytical models, numerical simulations and hydrographic data. In the Northern Hemisphere, the establishment of Atlantic Water transport as a topographically steered slope current has been investigated. A simplified analytical model based on geostrophic balance predicts that buoyancy loss ...

The Barents Sea Ice Sheet (BSIS) is a good palaeo-analogue to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), and understanding the key processes occurring during the deglaciation of the BSIS can yield important insights into the drivers and response of marine-based ice sheets to climatic changes. This is important since marine-based ice sheets, such as the BSIS and WAIS, are particularly vulnerable to oceanic ...

Due to their all-weather all-day capabilities and increased availability, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometric displacement datasets have gained popularity in a variety of scientific disciplines. Both satellite and ground-based platforms are used. Satellite-based radar instruments cover large areas on a regular basis without the need for in-situ instrumentation. As with all measuring ...

The subject of this thesis is self-organization, chaos and stochastic dynamics in laboratory plasmas, the magnetosphere, and in the Earth's climate system. For each of these systems we pose the question whether the global dynamics can be described by a set of a few variables governed by the same small number of deterministic equations. This problem is not trivial, because low-dimensional ...

This thesis proposes a novel approach to explore and extract context information attached with images, mainly gathered from social network sites. I first performed a user study, to understand the user behavior on social network sites. I inferred that the relationship among users have central importance.<p> <p>To assist users to annotate images in social network, I use existing metadata gathered ...

<p>The cryosphere of Arctic regions is undergoing rapid change due to century-scale global warming superimposed on millennial-scale natural climatic perturbations that started at the end of the last glacial cycle approximately 20,000 years ago [Slaymaker and Kelly, 2009]. The cryosphere refers to areas where low temperatures freeze water and form ice in the ocean (sea ice), on land (glaciers, ...

Norway's Arctic region is rich in wind resources and developing wind energy in the region can promote a green transition and economic development. However, the region's unique topography with fjords and mountains and cold climate conditions make wind resource assessment, generation analysis, and power forecasting particularly challenging. The accumulation of wind data and the emergence of data ...

An ever-increasing number of web applications are providing open services to a wide range of applications. Whilst traditional centralized approaches to services orchestration are successful for enterprise service-oriented systems, they are subject to serious limitations for orchestrating the wider range of open services. Dealing with these limitations calls for decentralized approaches. However, ...

Banks need to develop effective credit scoring models to better understand the relationship between customer information and the customer's ability to repay the loan. The output of such a model is called the default probability and is used to rank loan applications in terms of their creditworthiness. The focus of this thesis is to develop novel credit scoring methodologies that solve well-known ...