Pan-arctic glaciers volume changes over 1975-2019
- 1Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology (VAW), ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
- 2Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research (WSL), Birmensdorf, Switzerland
- 3NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
- 4Laboratoire d’Etudes en Géophysique et Océanographie Spatiales (LEGOS), Université de Toulouse, Toulouse, France
- 5Nordvulk, Institute of Earth Sciences, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland
Glaciers retreat contributed to about 1/3 of the observed sea level rise since 1971 (IPCC). However, long term estimates of glaciers volume changes rely on sparse field observations and region-wide satellite observations are available mostly after 2000. The now declassified images from the American reconnaissance satellite series Hexagon (KH-9), that acquired 6 m resolution stereoscopic images from 1971 to 1986, open new possibilities for glaciers observation.
Based on recently published methodology (Dehecq et al., 2020, doi: 10.3389/feart.2020.566802), we process all available KH-9 images over the Arctic (Canadian arctic, Iceland, Svalbard, Russian arctic) to generate Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) and ortho-images for the period 1974-1980. We validate the KH-9 DEMs over Iceland against elevation derived from historical aerial images acquired within a month from the satellite acquisition.
Finally, we calculate the glacier elevation change between the historical DEMs and modern elevation obtained from a time series of ASTER stereo images and validated against ICESat-2 elevation. The geodetic glacier mass balance is calculated for all pan-Arctic regions and analyzed with reference to the last 20 years evolution.
How to cite: Dehecq, A., Gardner, A., Hugonnet, R., and Belart, J.: Pan-arctic glaciers volume changes over 1975-2019, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-8606, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-8606, 2021.
