Online Program

Spatiotemporal Estimation of Mountain Glacier Retreat (302824)

Keywords: Global warming, Glacier variations, Climate change, Curve fitting, Spatiotemporal analysis, Tracking, Local polynomial regression, Plug-in bandwidth selection

Temporal variations in the extent of mountain glaciers help us understand the natural and forced changes of these indicators of climate change. There is a limited number of ground observations relative to the number of glaciers, and it is useful to develop techniques that permit for the monitoring of glacier systems using satellite imagery. A new approach for identifying the glacier terminus over time from Landsat images is proposed here. To identify candidate terminus locations, we detect the inflection points in multispectral satellite imagery taken along a glacier’s flow path. A tracking algorithm is then applied to identify the best candidate for the glacier terminus location through time. The long-term trend of the terminus position and its associated uncertainty bounds are finally estimated by applying nonparametric regression to the temporal sequence of estimated terminus locations. The proposed method performed consistently with ground-based observations for the Franz Josef and Gorner glaciers and is applied to estimate the retreat of Viedma, a glacier with no available ground measurements.