Time-series snowmelt detection over the Antarctic using Sentinel-1 SAR images on Google Earth Engine

The Antarctic ice sheet is an important mass of glacier ice. It is particularly sensitive to climate change, and the flow of Antarctica?s inland glaciers into the sea, accelerated by collapsing ice shelves, threatens global sea level rise. The amount of snowmelt on the surface of the ice sheet is an important metric for accurately assessing surface material loss and albedo change, which affect the stability of the ice sheet. This study proposes a framework for quickly extracting time-series freeze-thaw information at the continental scale and 40 m resolution by taking advantage of the huge amount of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data acquired by Sentinel-1 satellites over the Antarctic, available for rapid processing on Google Earth Engine. Co-orbit normalization is used in the proposed framework to establish a unified standard of judgement by reducing the variations in the backscattering coefficient introduced by observation geometry, terrain fluctuations, and melt conditions between images acquired at different times. We implemented the framework to produce a massive dataset of both monthly freeze-thaw information over the Antarctic and higher temporal resolution freeze-thaw information for the Larsen C ice shelf from 2015 to 2019, with overall accuracies of 93% verified by a manual visual interpretation method and 84% evaluated from automatic weather station temperatures. Due to its effectiveness and robustness, the framework can be used to analyse the spatiotemporal distribution of snowmelt, the change in melt area, and anomalous melt events in Antarctica, especially those in Larsen C caused by foehn wind.

Automated summary

The Antarctic ice sheet, sensitive to climate change, is threatened by the flow of inland glaciers and collapsing ice shelves. This study introduces a framework to extract freeze-thaw information at a continental scale using SAR data from Sentinel-1 satellites, allowing for accurate assessment of surface material loss and albedo change.