Please note: Importing new articles from Word documents is currently unavailable. We are working on fixing this issue soon and apologize for any inconvenience.

loading page

Supraglacial lake bathymetry automatically derived from ICESat-2 constraining lake depth estimates from multi-source satellite imagery
  • Rajashree Datta,
  • Bert Wouters
Rajashree Datta
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

Author Profile
Bert Wouters
Utrecht University
Author Profile

Abstract

We introduce an algorithm “Watta”, which automatically calculates supraglacial lake bathymmetry along tracks of the ICESat-2 laser altimeter. Watta uses photon heights estimated by the ICESat-2 ATL03 product and extracts supraglacial lake surface, bottom, corrected depth and (sub)surface ice cover on a lake. These measurements are used to constrain empirical estimates of lake depth from satellite imagery, which were thus far dependent on sparse sets of in-situ measurements for calibration. Imagery sources include Landsat OLI, Sentinel-2 and high-resolution Planet Labs PlanetScope and SkySat data, used here for the first time to calculate supraglacial lake depths. The algorithm was developed and tested using a set of 46 lakes near Sermeq Kujalleq (Jakobshavn) glacier in Western Greenland. Our results suggest that the use of multiple imagery sources (both publicly-available and commercial) in combination with altimetry-based depths, can move towards capturing the evolution of supraglacial hydrology at improved spatial and temporal scales.
12 Nov 2021Published in The Cryosphere volume 15 issue 11 on pages 5115-5132. 10.5194/tc-15-5115-2021