The Pléiades Glacier Observatory: high-resolution digital elevation models and ortho-imagery to monitor glacier change
<p>Spaceborne digital elevation models (DEMs) of glaciers are essential to describe their health and their contribution to river runoff and sea level rise. Publicly available DEMs derived from sub-meter satellite stereo imagery were, up to now, mainly available in the polar regions and High Mo...
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Copernicus Publications
2024-11-01
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| Series: | The Cryosphere |
| Online Access: | https://tc.copernicus.org/articles/18/5551/2024/tc-18-5551-2024.pdf |
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| Summary: | <p>Spaceborne digital elevation models (DEMs) of glaciers are essential to describe their health and their contribution to river runoff and sea level rise. Publicly available DEMs derived from sub-meter satellite stereo imagery were, up to now, mainly available in the polar regions and High Mountain Asia. Here, we present the Pléiades Glacier Observatory (PGO), a scientific program acquiring Pléiades 0.7 m satellite stereo pairs for 140 sites from Earth's glacierized areas. The PGO product consists of freely available DEMs at 2 and 20 m ground sampling distance together with 0.5 m (panchromatic) and 2 m (multispectral) ortho-images. PGO stereo acquisitions began in July 2016 in the Northern Hemisphere and February 2017 in the Southern Hemisphere. Each site is revisited every 5 years (cloud permitting), close to the end of the melt season, to measure glacier elevation change with an average uncertainty of 0.49 m (95 % confidence level, for a glacierized area of 1 <span class="inline-formula">km<sup>2</sup></span>), i.e., 0.1 <span class="inline-formula">m yr<sup>−1</sup></span>. PGO samples over 20 000 <span class="inline-formula">km<sup>2</sup></span> of glacierized terrain, which represents about 3 % of the Earth's glacier area. This small sample, however, provides a first-order estimate (within 0.07 <span class="inline-formula"><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M4" display="inline" overflow="scroll" dspmath="mathml"><mrow class="unit"><mi mathvariant="normal">m</mi><mspace width="0.125em" linebreak="nobreak"/><mi mathvariant="normal">w</mi><mo>.</mo><mi mathvariant="normal">e</mi><mo>.</mo><mspace linebreak="nobreak" width="0.125em"/><msup><mi mathvariant="normal">yr</mi><mrow><mo>-</mo><mn mathvariant="normal">1</mn></mrow></msup></mrow></math><span><svg:svg xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="52pt" height="15pt" class="svg-formula" dspmath="mathimg" md5hash="351e08838da10f4b82b11a189d21928d"><svg:image xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="tc-18-5551-2024-ie00001.svg" width="52pt" height="15pt" src="tc-18-5551-2024-ie00001.png"/></svg:svg></span></span>) of the global glacier mass change and its decadal evolution.</p> |
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| ISSN: | 1994-0416 1994-0424 |