Automatically delineating the calving front of Jakobshavn Isbræ from multitemporal TerraSAR-X images: a deep learning approach

• Published in: The Cryosphere
• Main Authors: E. Zhang, L. Liu, L. Huang
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2019
• Subjects: Environmental sciences; GE1-350; Geology; QE1-996.5; Greenland; Jakobshavn Isbræ; Ice Sheet; Jakobshavn; Jakobshavn isbræ; The Cryosphere
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-13-1729-2019; https://doaj.org/article/40d0c4478d6c4c4785c38188f1cde657

The calving fronts of many tidewater glaciers in Greenland have been undergoing strong seasonal and interannual fluctuations. Conventionally, calving front positions have been manually delineated from remote sensing images. But manual practices can be labor-intensive and time-consuming, particularly when processing a large number of images taken over decades and covering large areas with many glaciers, such as Greenland. Applying U-Net, a deep learning architecture, to multitemporal synthetic aperture radar images taken by the TerraSAR-X satellite, we here automatically delineate the calving front positions of Jakobshavn Isbræ from 2009 to 2015. Our results are consistent with the manually delineated products generated by the Greenland Ice Sheet Climate Change Initiative project. We show that the calving fronts of Jakobshavn's two main branches retreated at mean rates of <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M1" display="inline" overflow="scroll" dspmath="mathml"><mrow><mo>-</mo><mn mathvariant="normal">117</mn><mo>±</mo><mn mathvariant="normal">1</mn></mrow></math> <svg:svg xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="46pt" height="10pt" class="svg-formula" dspmath="mathimg" md5hash="748ecebd20d29add9c85dda21961b026"><svg:image xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="tc-13-1729-2019-ie00001.svg" width="46pt" height="10pt" src="tc-13-1729-2019-ie00001.png"/></svg:svg> and <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M2" display="inline" overflow="scroll" dspmath="mathml"><mrow><mo>-</mo><mn mathvariant="normal">157</mn><mo>±</mo><mn mathvariant="normal">1</mn></mrow></math> <svg:svg xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="46pt" height="10pt" class="svg-formula" dspmath="mathimg" md5hash="a87faaa2796741d1190a8d8afebc05f5"><svg:image xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ...