Snow and ice surfaces on King George Island (Antarctic Peninsula) with high-resolution TerraSAR-X time series, with links to shapfiles and GeoTIFFs

Changes of glaciers and snow cover in polar regions affect a wide range of physical and ecosystem processes on land and in the adjacent marine environment. In this study, we investigate the potential of 11-day repeat high-resolution satellite image time series from the TerraSAR-X mission to derive g...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Falk, Ulrike, Gieseke, Hilke, Kotzur, Franziska, Braun, Matthias Holger
Format: Dataset
Language:English
Published: PANGAEA 2015
Subjects:
File content
File format
File size
IMCOAST/IMCONet
Impact of climate induced glacier melt on marine coastal systems
Antarctica
King_George_Island
King George Island
Antarctic Peninsula
Uniform resource locator/link to file
Antarctic
Fourcade
Fourcade Glacier
Antarc*
Antarctic Science
Online Access:https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.853954
https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.853954
Description
Summary:Changes of glaciers and snow cover in polar regions affect a wide range of physical and ecosystem processes on land and in the adjacent marine environment. In this study, we investigate the potential of 11-day repeat high-resolution satellite image time series from the TerraSAR-X mission to derive glaciological and hydrological parameters on King George Island, Antarctica during the period Oct/25/2010 to Apr/19/2011. The spatial pattern and temporal evolution of snow cover extent on ice-free areas can be monitored using multi-temporal coherence images. SAR coherence is used to map glacier extent of land terminating glaciers with an average accuracy of 25 m. Multi-temporal SAR color composites identify the position of the late summer snow line at about 220 m above sea level. Glacier surface velocities are obtained from intensity feature-tracking. Surface velocities near the calving front of Fourcade Glacier were up to 1.8 ± 0.01 m/d. Using an intercept theorem based on fundamental geometric principles together with differential GPS field measurements, the ice discharge of Fourcade Glacier was estimated to 20700 ± 5500 m**3/d (corresponding to ~19 ± 5 kt/d). The rapidly changing surface conditions on King George Island and the lack of high-resolution digital elevation models for the region remain restrictions for the applicability of SAR data and the precision of derived products.

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