The construction of normalized enhanced water index and the extraction of supra-glacial water based on WorldView-2 imagery

As an important part of the mass balance of the Ice Sheet,Supra-glacial Water not only reflects the diversity of polar environmental changes,but also plays an important role in the study of global climate and environmental changes.In this paper,we chose northern Greenland as the research area,and constructed a Normalized Enhanced Water Index(NEWI)based on the high-precision WorldView-2 images of different phases during the ablation period in northern Greenland,followed by a statistical analysis on the spectral characteristics of the images were for the typical features in the study area.Then the fuzzy areas with similar gray values of thin sea ice and shallow ice water bodies were located,according to the distribution rules of ground objects and histogram graphic features of the images,so as to enhance the contrast of ground objects between the regions,and finally the extraction of the fine range of water bodies on the ice surface.Experimental results showed that the proposed index effectively highlighted the ice water with the water of the reflectivity difference,compared with the commonly used water index NDWI,etc.,especially in shallow water,which contributes to differentiation from other objects.The precision evaluation showed that the applied method of extraction has higher degree of refinement compared with other methods,by which the ice water can get complete ice water effectively.

High-precision measurements of the inter-annual evolution for Urumqi Glacier No.1 in eastern Tien Shan,China

High-precision measuring of glacier evolution remains a challenge as the available global and regional remote sensing techniques cannot satisfactorily capture the local-scale processes of most small-and medium-sized mountain glaciers.In this study,we use a high-precision local remote sensing technique,long-range terrestrial laser scanning(TLS),to measure the evolution of Urumqi Glacier No.1 at an annual scale.We found that the dense point clouds derived from the TLS survey can be used to reconstruct glacier surface terrain,with certain details,such as depressions,debris-covered areas,and supra-glacial drainages can be distinguished.The glacier experienced pronounced thickness thinning and continuous retreat over the last four mass-balance years(2015−2019).The mean surface slope of Urumqi Glacier No.1 gradually steepened,which may increase the removal of glacier mass.The glacier was deeply incised by two very prominent primary supra-glacial rivers,and those rivers presented a widening trend.Extensive networks of supra-glacial channels had a significant impact on accelerated glacier mass loss.High-precision measuring is of vital importance to understanding the annual evolution of this type of glacier.

Evidence for Accelerating Glacier Ice Loss in the Takht' e Solaiman Mountains of Iran from 1955 to 2010

This study reports on the clean ice area and surface elevation changes of the Khersan and Merjikesh glaciers in the north of Iran between 1955 and 2010 based on several high to medium spatial resolution remote sensing data.The object-oriented classification technique has been applied to nine remote sensing images to estimate the debris-free areas.The satellite-based analysis revealed that the clean ice areas of Khersan and Merjikesh glaciers shrank since 2010 with an overall area decrease of about 45% and 60% respectively.It means that the dramatic proportions of 1955 glaciers surface area are covered with debris during the last five decades.Although the general trend is a clean ice area decrease,some advancement is observed over the period of 1997-2004.During 1987-1991 the maximum decrease in the clean ice area was observed.However,the clean ice area had steadily increased between 1997 and 2010.To quantify the elevation changes besides the debris-free change analysis,several Digital Elevation Models(DEMs) were extracted from aerial photo(1955),topographic map(1997),ASTER image(2002) and Worldview-2 image(2010) and after it a 3-D Coregistration and a linear relationship adjustments techniques were used to remove the systematic shifts and elevation dependent biases.Unlike the sinusoidal variation of our case studies which was inferred from planimetric analysis,the elevation change results revealed that the glacier surface lowering has occurred during 1955-2010 continuously without any thickening with the mean annual thinning of about 0.4 ± 0.04 m per year and 0.3 ± 0.026 m per year for Khersan and Merjikesh glaciers,respectively.The maximum thinning rate has been observed during 1997-2002(about 1.1 ± 0.09 per year and 0.96 ± 0.01 mper year,respectively),which was compatible partially with debris-free change analysis.The present result demonstrates that although in debris-covered glaciers clean ice area change analysis can illustrate the direction of changes(retreat or advance),due to the high uncertainty in glacier area delineation in such glaciers,it cannot reveal the actual glacier changes.Thus,both planimetric and volumetric change analyses are very critical to obtain accurate glacier variation results.