Abstract
Glaciers exhibit a wide range of surface facies that can be analyzed as proxies for mass balance studies. Along with hydrological implications, these are in turn quintessential indicators of climate change. Moderate-to-high-resolution (MHR) data for mapping glacier facies have been used previously; however, the use of very high-resolution (VHR) data for this purpose has not yet been fully exploited. This study uses WorldView-2 (WV-2) VHR data to classify available glacier surface facies on the Samudra Tapu glacier, located in the Himalayas. Traditional methods of facies classification using conventional multispectral data involve band rationing and/or supervised classification. This study explores glacier surface facies classification by using the unique bands available in the multispectral range of WV-2 to develop customized spectral index ratios (SIRs) within an object-oriented domain. The results of this object-oriented classification (OOC) are then compared with five popular supervised classification algorithms using error matrices to determine the classification accuracies. The overall accuracy achieved by the object-based image analysis (OBIA) approach is 97.14% (κ = 0.96), and the highest overall accuracy among the pixel-based classification methods is 74.28% (κ = 0.70). The present results show that the object-based approach is far more accurate than the pixel-based classification techniques. Further studies should test the robustness of the object-oriented domain for the classification of glacier surface facies using customized sensor-specific as well as transferable indices, and the resultant accuracies.
Highlights
The extraction of facies has been performed on data acquired in the ablation season, this study aims to map the available facies using a dataset acquired during early winter
This study focuses on the Samudra Tapu glacier which is situated in the upper Chandra basin of the Himalayas, in the district of Lahaul and Spiti, Himachal Pradesh
On comparative analysis of the results obtained, it is evident that the pixel-based methods were inferior to the object-based techniques
Summary
The geometrical changes associated with these variations are often used to describe the recession or advancement of a glacier [1]. These parameters are used to calculate the mass balance of the glacier by assessment of the net gain (net accumulation) or net loss (net ablation). Glacier facies represent regional differences in diagenetic stratification on a glacier, owing to summer melt and winter accumulation characteristics [2]. A recent study [4] analyzed the effects of glacier facies changes on the dimensional variations of glaciers, including recession, deglaciation, as well as the impact of
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