IcePicks: a collaborative database of Greenland outlet glacier termini

Marine-terminating outlet glacier terminus change mapped from satellite and aerial imagery in Greenland is used extensively in understanding how outlet glaciers adjust to climatic changes over a range of time scales. Numerous studies have digitized termini manually, but this process is labor-intensive and may lead to duplication of efforts. Additionally, these studies use different methods to pick the front (e.g. centerline pick, whole delineation, box method), which makes them difficult to compare. At the same time, machine learning techniques are rapidly making progress in their ability to accurately automate the extraction of glacier termini, with promising developments across a number of satellite sensors. However, limitations still exist: in particular, further high-quality manually-digitized training data are needed to make robust automatic picks. Here we present efforts to produce a database of manually digitized terminus picks and an intercomparison of picking techniques to determine errors and best practices for future efforts in digitization. These data will be cleaned, associated with appropriate metadata, and compiled so they can be easily accessed by scientists. Ultimately, these data will be used to create training data for further automatic picking efforts. We hope to solicit further collaboration with members of EGU and encourage those interested to email the authors.