Abstract
In this work, we present the results of a low-cost optical monitoring station designed for monitoring the kinematics of glaciers in an Alpine environment. We developed a complete hardware/software data acquisition and processing chain that automatically acquires, stores and co-registers images. The system was installed in September 2013 to monitor the evolution of the Planpincieux glacier, within the open-air laboratory of the Grandes Jorasses, Mont Blanc massif (NW Italy), and collected data with an hourly frequency. The acquisition equipment consists of a high-resolution DSLR camera operating in the visible band. The data are processed with a Pixel Offset algorithm based on normalized cross-correlation, to estimate the deformation of the observed glacier. We propose a method for the pixel-to-metric conversion and present the results of the projection on the mean slope of the glacier. The method performances are compared with measurements obtained by GB-SAR, and exhibit good agreement. The system provides good support for the analysis of the glacier evolution and allows the creation of daily displacement maps.
Highlights
During the last century, global warming has caused a great retreat of glaciers, especially in the Northern Hemisphere [1]
We developed a monitoring station composed by different modules (Table 1, Figure 3)
Advances in hardware and software have led to the design of optical and visual technologies for the quantitative monitoring of gravitational processes [24]
Summary
Global warming has caused a great retreat of glaciers, especially in the Northern Hemisphere [1]. Glaciers have an important impact on population because they store fresh water, thereby affecting agriculture, water management and hydroelectric power plants [2]. This trend has increased the frequency of glacier-related instabilities, which constitute a major concern in mountain areas, in particular in the Alps, where they can interact with densely populated areas [3,4,5]. An important example of these processes is the break-off of temperate or polythermal glaciers, resulting from a combination of geometric, thermal and water flow conditions. These conditions are still poorly understood, making prediction of break-off events difficult. This is partially due to the lack of systematic long-term observations of temperate glaciers and to the difficulty of monitoring this particular geomorphological process
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