Analysis of the melting glaciers in Southeast Tibet by ALOS-PALSAR data

Wenjie Du,Yi Shen,Jinyun Guo,Xin Liu,Xiaotao Chang,Wang Li

doi:10.3319/tao.2018.07.09.03

Abstract

Analysis of the melting glaciers in Southeast Tibet by ALOS-PALSAR data

Highlights

The polar ice sheets and continental glaciers are melting with the global warming, especially in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets (GIS and AIS) (Allison et al 2009)
The deformation time series of each small set can be computed by the least squares method, and the time series of the whole time period is obtained by using singular value decomposition (SVD) to calculate the multiple small baseline sets
The results indicated that the glaciers in the southeast Tibet were suffering from strong melting, and the glaciers in upper and lower two deformed regions divided by a fault zone decreased with different rates in a quasi linear manner in the four years

Summary

Introduction

The polar ice sheets and continental glaciers are melting with the global warming, especially in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets (GIS and AIS) (Allison et al 2009). Remote sensing monitoring of glacier melting includes mainly ICESat (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite) with laser altimetry (Gardner et al 2013) and interferometric radar measurements (Hwang et al 2019). The former is limited by the geographic distribution of ICESat at ground tracks, which is failure to monitor small glaciers without any satellite pass. Due to the all-weather and alltime dynamic monitoring characteristics of microwave, the interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) has an irreplaceable role on the extraction and assessment of vertical deformation information and melting areas of continental glaciers. The mass balance detected by GRACE can reflect the vertical glacier surface displacements (Guo et al 2014), but the main problem is its instability and non-exclusiveness of gravitational field inversion, especially in a small spatial scale

Methods

Results

Conclusion