Application of high-resolution multispectral data for mapping blue ice areas in the Antarctic environment

Abstract

High resolution calibrated PAN-sharpened images from WorldView-2 (WV-2) were used for extracting blue ice areas in Schirmacher Oasis, east Antarctica. The Schirmacher oasis extends from 70°45′ S to 70° 75′ S and 11°38′ E to 11° 38′ E. Blue ice areas represents long-term ablation. The amplitude of blue ice is lower than that of snow, because the ice surface is smoother than the latter. But the difference is not so obvious when applying automatic extraction techniques. To achieve desirable results and support comparative analysis, multiband image combinations were generated from atmospherically-corrected WV-2 data. For feature extraction process, regions of interest (ROI) were considered in which blue ice was used as target and white snow/ice appearing on the blue ice was considered as non-target. Various semiautomatic feature extraction methods, such as, target detection, mapping methods, etc, and many trials were used for extracting blue ice areas. Surface patterns of alternating snow and blue ice bands were found in east Antarctica which becomes obstacle to clearly extract blue ice feature. From the high resolution WV-2 data, reference data (digitized data) were prepared for blue ice area. By comparing reference data and extracted data, bias and root mean square (RMS) error values were calculated. Accuracy assessment was done considering the entire necessary prior results of the blue ice area. Our results indicate that the pixel-based supervised classification methods yielded an overall accuracy ranging from 82%-89% for extraction of blue ice areas.