Dual-satellite (Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8) remote sensing of supraglacial lakes in Greenland ...

• Main Authors: Williamson, AG, Banwell, AF, Willis, IC, Arnold, NS
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2018
• Subjects: 37 Earth Sciences; 4013 Geomatic Engineering; 3709 Physical Geography and Environmental Geoscience; 40 Engineering; Bioengineering; 13 Climate Action; Greenland; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.17863/cam.32538; https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/285168

© 2018 All rights reserved. Remote sensing is commonly used to monitor supraglacial lakes on the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS); however, most satellite records must trade off higher spatial resolution for higher temporal resolution (e.g. MODIS) or vice versa (e.g. Landsat). Here, we overcome this issue by developing and applying a dual-sensor method that can monitor changes to lake areas and volumes at high spatial resolution (10-30 m) with a frequent revisit time ( ~ 3 days). We achieve this by mosaicking imagery from the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) with imagery from the recently launched Sentinel-2 Multispectral Instrument (MSI) for a ~ 12 000 km2area of West Greenland in the 2016 melt season. First, we validate a physically based method for calculating lake depths with Sentinel-2 by comparing measurements against those derived from the available contemporaneous Landsat 8 imagery; we find close correspondence between the two sets of values (R2Combining double low line 0.841; RMSE Combining double ...