Glacier Image Velocimetry: an open-source toolbox for easy and rapid calculation of high-resolution glacier velocity fields

We present Glacier Image Velocimetry (GIV), an open-source and easy-to-use software toolkit for rapidly calculating high-spatial-resolution glacier velocity fields. Glacier ice velocity fields reveal flow dynamics, ice-flux changes, and (with additional data and modelling) ice thickness. Obtaining g...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Cryosphere
Main Authors: M. Van Wyk de Vries, A. D. Wickert
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Copernicus Publications 2021
Subjects:
Environmental sciences
GE1-350
Geology
QE1-996.5
Argentina
Moreno
glacier
Ice cap
The Cryosphere
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-2115-2021
https://doaj.org/article/d63253f9fa7c4cb7ba6d6e169819f068
Description
Summary:We present Glacier Image Velocimetry (GIV), an open-source and easy-to-use software toolkit for rapidly calculating high-spatial-resolution glacier velocity fields. Glacier ice velocity fields reveal flow dynamics, ice-flux changes, and (with additional data and modelling) ice thickness. Obtaining glacier velocity measurements over wide areas with field techniques is labour intensive and often associated with safety risks. The recent increased availability of high-resolution, short-repeat-time optical imagery allows us to obtain ice displacement fields using “feature tracking” based on matching persistent irregularities on the ice surface between images and hence, surface velocity over time. GIV is fully parallelized and automatically detects, filters, and extracts velocities from large datasets of images. Through this coupled toolchain and an easy-to-use GUI, GIV can rapidly analyse hundreds to thousands of image pairs on a laptop or desktop computer. We present four example applications of the GIV toolkit in which we complement a glaciology field campaign (Glaciar Perito Moreno, Argentina) and calculate the velocity fields of small mid-latitude (Glacier d'Argentière, France) and tropical glaciers (Volcán Chimborazo, Ecuador), as well as very large glaciers (Vavilov Ice Cap, Russia). Fully commented MATLAB code and a stand-alone app for GIV are available from GitHub and Zenodo (see https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4624831 , Van Wyk de Vries , 2021 a ).

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