TY - JOUR
T1 - A decadal investigation of supraglacial lakes in West Greenland using a fully automatic detection and tracking algorithm
AU - Liang, Yu-Li
AU - Colgan, William
AU - Lv, Qin
AU - Steffen, Konrad
AU - Abdalati, Waleed
AU - Stroeve, Julienne
AU - Gallaher, David
AU - Bayou, Nicolas
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant ARC 0941442 to J.S., D.G. and Q.L. We thank the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for freely providing MODIS data from the Warehouse Inventory Search Tool (WIST). Y.L. thanks David Fanning for his advice and assistance during the early stages of this project. W.C. thanks the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) for fellowship support. We thank Doug MacAyeal for an insightful collegial review of an earlier version of this manuscript.
PY - 2012/8
Y1 - 2012/8
N2 - The sudden drainage of supraglacial lakes has been previously observed to initiate surface-to-bed hydrologic connections, which are capable of enhancing basal sliding, in regions of the Greenland Ice Sheet where ice thickness approaches 1. km. In this study, we develop a robust algorithm, which automatically detects and tracks individual supraglacial lakes using visible satellite imagery, to document the evolution of a population of West Greenland supraglacial lakes over ten consecutive melt seasons. Validation tests indicate that the algorithm is highly accurate: 99.0% of supraglacial lakes can be detected and tracked and 96.3% of reported lakes are true supraglacial lakes with accurate lake properties, such as lake area, and timing of formation and drainage. Investigation of the interannual evolution of supraglacial lakes in the context of annual melt intensity reveals that during more intense melt years, supraglacial lakes drain more frequently and earlier in the melt season. Additionally, the lake population extends to higher elevations during more intense melt years, exposing an increased inland area of the ice sheet to sudden lake drainage events. These observations suggest that increased surface meltwater production due to climate change will enhance the spatial extent and temporal frequency of lake drainage events. It is unclear whether this will ultimately increase or decrease the basal sliding sensitivity of interior regions of the Greenland Ice Sheet.
AB - The sudden drainage of supraglacial lakes has been previously observed to initiate surface-to-bed hydrologic connections, which are capable of enhancing basal sliding, in regions of the Greenland Ice Sheet where ice thickness approaches 1. km. In this study, we develop a robust algorithm, which automatically detects and tracks individual supraglacial lakes using visible satellite imagery, to document the evolution of a population of West Greenland supraglacial lakes over ten consecutive melt seasons. Validation tests indicate that the algorithm is highly accurate: 99.0% of supraglacial lakes can be detected and tracked and 96.3% of reported lakes are true supraglacial lakes with accurate lake properties, such as lake area, and timing of formation and drainage. Investigation of the interannual evolution of supraglacial lakes in the context of annual melt intensity reveals that during more intense melt years, supraglacial lakes drain more frequently and earlier in the melt season. Additionally, the lake population extends to higher elevations during more intense melt years, exposing an increased inland area of the ice sheet to sudden lake drainage events. These observations suggest that increased surface meltwater production due to climate change will enhance the spatial extent and temporal frequency of lake drainage events. It is unclear whether this will ultimately increase or decrease the basal sliding sensitivity of interior regions of the Greenland Ice Sheet.
KW - Change detection
KW - Greenland Ice Sheet
KW - Melt intensity
KW - MODIS
KW - Supraglacial lake
KW - Temporal tracking
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84859628409&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.rse.2012.03.020
DO - 10.1016/j.rse.2012.03.020
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84859628409
SN - 0034-4257
VL - 123
SP - 127
EP - 138
JO - Remote Sensing of Environment
JF - Remote Sensing of Environment
ER -