Detecting Calving Events of Icebergs D-28 and B-49 using High Resolution Sentinel-1A SAR Data

Detecting iceberg calving events and subsequently tracking their movement is important because large icebergs can create problem in shipping and navigation. This study discusses two calving events that took place at 1) Amery ice shelf (East Antarctica) in September 2019 and 2) Pine Island Glacier’s floating ice shelf (West Antarctica) in February 2020. Though the calving that occurred in September 2019 does not have any impact on climate change, it is considered to be the most significant calving event on Amery ice shelf since 1963-64. The gigantic tabular iceberg officially named D-28 measures more than 600 square-miles. On the other hand, Pine Island is considered as the fastest retreating glaciers in Antarctica. This calving event gave rise to smaller icebergs, the largest of which was 120 square-miles, big enough to earn it a name: B-49. Though ice calving is a normal phenomenon at the ice shelves, the front of the glacier is stable if the rate of calving is in synchronization with the glacier’s forward flow. But, at Pine Island, the rate of disintegration has increased more than the glacier's speed to push the inland ice into Pine Island Bay. On-screen digitization approach of analysing time series dataset of glacier front positions is conventional, time consuming and subjective. To track the movement of icebergs D-28 and B-49, present study has detected rifts using canny edge detection filter and textural measures. We have utilized the Sentinel 1A SAR C-band (GRD) EW mode (Resolution (Rg x Az): 93 x 87 m and pixel spacing 40 x 40 m) images pertaining to the Amery ice shelf for Sep 2020-Mar 2020 and Pine Island Glacier with Pine Island Bay for Dec 2019-Mar 2020. All the images were processed for calibration (sigma0), speckle filtering (refined Lee), terrain correction (Range Doppler) and dB conversion using SNAP tool. Terrain correction has been performed using RAMP v2 DEM (200 m) and all the images have been projected to WGS 84/Antarctic Polar Stereographic projection and converted into dB. Through image interpretation, it is revealed that as of Mar 2020, iceberg D-28 has rotated almost 90 degrees anti-clockwise and drifted slightly northward away from Cape Darnley. In case of iceberg B-49, it is observed that the western portion of the calved ice, including the largest iceberg, has rapidly rotated out into Pine Island Bay, whereas the eastern half, including many smaller shards of ice, is following in similar fashion.