Journal
CRYOSPHERE
Volume 15, Issue 10, Pages 4901-4907Publisher
COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH
DOI: 10.5194/tc-15-4901-2021
Keywords
-
Funding
- ESA [4000109873/14/I-NB, 4000127593/19/I-NS, 4000127656/19/NL/FF/gp]
- Norwegian Copernicus Service, Norwegian Space Centre [NIT.06.15.5]
- MAMMAMIA project (RCN) [301837]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The study uses Sentinel-1 radar images within Google Earth Engine to detect glacier surges worldwide, providing a global map of annual backscatter changes which can support the monitoring of glacier surges.
For studying the flow of glaciers and their response to climate change it is important to detect glacier surges. Here, we compute within Google Earth Engine the normalized differences between winter maxima of Sentinel-1 C-band radar backscatter image stacks over subsequent years. We arrive at a global map of annual backscatter changes, which are for glaciers in most cases related to changed crevassing associated with surge-type activity. For our demonstration period 2018-2019 we detected 69 surging glaciers, with many of them not classified so far as surge type. Comparison with glacier surface velocities shows that we reliably find known surge activities. Our method can support operational monitoring of glacier surges and some other special events such as large rock and snow avalanches.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available