Abstract
Abstract. Detection of subglacial lakes and interpretation their hydrological connectivity is of great importance to understanding the mass balance of Antarctic ice sheet. Over the past five decades, a large number of Radio Echo Sounding (RES) data has been collected in Antarctica. However, the identification of subglacial lakes based on RES data mainly relies on visual interpretation due to the lack of quantitative indicators for subglacial lakes distinguishing. To solve this problem, an automatic subglacial lakes detection method based on the reflective characteristics of B-scan echogram is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the echo strength of the original radar echogram is corrected for the dielectric attenuation and geometric spreading in the ice. Secondly, the original radar echogram is binarized to preserve the bright subglacial lake region, and the thickness of bright pixels is measured along the direction of A-scan. Thirdly, the thickness, the variance of the thickness in the neighbourhood and the corrected echo strength are used to obtain the response value for the subglacial lake. Finally, a threshold for the response value is determined to detect subglacial lakes. It is found that the proposed method can determine the location of the subglacial lake in Antarctica's Gamburtsev Province (AGAP) region with high accuracy.
Highlights
Radio Echo Sounding (RES), one of many geophysical methods, has been widely used in the detection of ice thickness, subglacial topography, and internal structure of ice sheet in Antarctica (Evans 1963)
To improve the accuracy and automation of subglacial lakes identification, this paper proposes two new criteria based on the reflective characteristics on B-scan echogram, and combines them with corrected echo strength to obtain the response value for subglacial lakes to improve the accuracy
The locations of subglacial lakes in echograms of different regions can be better extracted by the proposed method
Summary
Radio Echo Sounding (RES), one of many geophysical methods, has been widely used in the detection of ice thickness, subglacial topography, and internal structure of ice sheet in Antarctica (Evans 1963). In the processing of RES data, subglacial lakes are recognized as the characteristics of higher echo strength, higher flatness and smoothness than other basal interfaces (Gorman and Siegert, 1999; Siegert et al, 1996), which greatly reduces the difficulty of the determination of subglacial lakes (Dowdeswell and Siegert, 2003). This still largely depended on visual interpretation of RES echograms (Oswald 1975; Palmer et al, 2013). Only a single threshold is needed in this identification scheme to improve the automation
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