SPATIOTEMPORAL CHANGES IN VELOCITY OF MELLOR GLACIER, EAST ANTARCTICA USING LANDSAT-8 DATA
Glaciers all over the world are experiencing changes at varying stages due to changing climatic conditions. Minuscule changes in the glaciers in Antarctica can thus have major implications. The velocity of glaciers is important in several aspects of glaciology. A glacier’s movement is caused by diff...
| Published in: | The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences |
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Copernicus Publications
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLII-5-787-2018 https://doaj.org/article/f040711e3adb491281728b6728318879 |
| Summary: | Glaciers all over the world are experiencing changes at varying stages due to changing climatic conditions. Minuscule changes in the glaciers in Antarctica can thus have major implications. The velocity of glaciers is important in several aspects of glaciology. A glacier’s movement is caused by different factors such as gravity, internal deformation present in the ice, pressure caused by accumulation of snow, basal sliding etc. The velocity of a glacier is an important factor governing mass balance and the stability of the glacier. A glacier which moves fast generally brings more ice towards the terminus than a slow moving glacier. Thus, the glacier velocity can determine its load carrying capacity and gives indication on the ‘health’ of the glacier. Measurement of the ice flow velocity can help model glacier dynamics and thus provide increasing insights on different glacier subtleties. However, field measurements of velocity are limited in spatial and temporal domains because these operations are manual, tedious and logistically expensive. Remote sensing is a tool to monitor and generate such data without the need for physical expeditions. This study uses optical satellite imagery to understand the mechanisms involved in the movement of a glacier. Optical image correlation method (COSI-Corr module) is chosen here as the promising method to derive displacement of a moving glacier. The principle involved in this technique is that two images acquired at different times are correlated to find the shift in the position of moving ice, which is then treated as displacement in the time interval. Employing this technique we estimated the velocity of Mellor glacier (73°30′S, 66°30′E), a tributary glacier of the Amery Ice Shelf, Antarctica, over a span of four years from 2014 to 2017. Correlation is performed using Landsat-8 panchromatic images of 15 m resolution. Optical images from Landsat 8 often have noise due to atmospheric conditions such as cloud cover, so we used only those images cloud with cloud cover less than ... |
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