Nischay Soni

and 7 more

Critical freshwater resources lying within mid-latitude mountain glaciers are vulnerable to a rapidly changing climate. The Lehman Rock Glacier is the only extant glacier mapped within the Great Basin National Park in Nevada. As part of an effort to understand this specialized alpine environment, we have been studying this area and conducting observations with annual student research visitations since 2005. Deploying mixed methods including an embedded sensor network, paleoclimate reconstructions, hydrological observations, and unmanned aerial system (UAS) operations, our team has documented diverse evidence of climate change over interannual to millennial scales. Starting in 2015, we conducted annual surveys of the rock glacier to measure topographic changes. Initially, we used balloon-borne photogrammetry, capturing 600+ images over about 0.1 km2 at an altitude of 500m above ground level (AGL). Despite impartial terrain coverage (50-80%) caused by limited control of the balloon rig in the air, digital elevation modeling (DEM) differencing resolved a net volume loss of 5,300m3 between 2015 and 2016. Submission of a Certification Of Approval (COA) granted our team permission to fly a UAV for the first time within the National Park in 2018 and 2019 to map the rock glacier. UAS surveying over successive days in August with > 80% horizontal and vertical overlap helped achieved 100% coverage with 900+ photos. Using previous year’s DEMs, we have optimized autonomous flight planning at 80m AGL and 168m AGL at 8.5mh and 20kmh, respectively. We will present our most recent computations of the glacier changes from years 2018 and 2019 and discuss how UAS instrumentation techniques are helping us observe changing glacier conditions at centimeter-scale resolution, better understand ecosystem relationships, and improve capabilities to model future landscapes all while mitigating mountain safety issues.