The satellites we have been using for the last few decades can accurately measure sea surface temperature and create nice visible wavelength pictures.
The old ones did 1Km resolution looking straight down from their polar orbits, ample resolution when you have something the size of Greenland, and I am sure the resolution has improved considerably since then. You also get several passes a day over a given location, day or night.
I dare say that this application is pretty well covered and the batteries of that drone in Antarctica (or Greenland) would have a hard job keeping up.
There is also the problem of registering whatever data you get to align with a map. Imagery from a normal plane is not that easy, given the flight characteristics of a drone I suspect that it is quite hard to get the imagery to line up even if you can fly from A to B in a straight line with GPS.
The old ones did 1Km resolution looking straight down from their polar orbits, ample resolution when you have something the size of Greenland, and I am sure the resolution has improved considerably since then. You also get several passes a day over a given location, day or night.
I dare say that this application is pretty well covered and the batteries of that drone in Antarctica (or Greenland) would have a hard job keeping up.
There is also the problem of registering whatever data you get to align with a map. Imagery from a normal plane is not that easy, given the flight characteristics of a drone I suspect that it is quite hard to get the imagery to line up even if you can fly from A to B in a straight line with GPS.