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

• 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

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.