Remote sensing has traditionally been afforded only limited use in Arctic marine mammal research. This is primarily because the summers are short and often cloud covered; winters are long and solar illumination is limited to a few hours of twilight. Orbital sensors operating on a repeat cycle of 16 days simply do not offer the biologist a sufficiently reliable tool for habitat assessment studies. Compounding the data availability problem was the substantial entry cost to acquire and interpret digital remote sensing imagery. With the increase in computational power of microcomputers and the increasing availability of orbital remote sensing imagery (both the decreasing costs and increase in the number of available sensors) the utility of orbital platforms for Arctic marine mammal research should be re-examined.
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