Professor Seymour Laxon was a climate physicist whose pioneering use of satellite data to estimate the thickness of polar sea ice — regarded as the Holy Grail of remote sensing — is crucial in understanding changes in ice cover and proved valuable in developing models of climate change. His work was also pivotal to the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 mission, launched in 2010, currently orbiting the Earth measuring ice thickness.
In satellite altimetry the height of a satellite is calculated by bouncing radar pulses off the Earth’s surface and timing their return to the satellite. It was initially used to measure sea surface heights across open ocean, but Laxon applied it also to ice-covered oceans, having devised ways to distinguish signals from ice and water.