Studies of snow surface characteristics by Landsat TM in Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica

Abstract

Large scale melting phenomena like meltwater drainage channels and meltwater accumulation basins or frozen “lakes” have been surveyed on the land ice mass in Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica. These melting features were also detected in a Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) image recorded on 12 February 1990. Image processing techniques such as principal component (PC) analysis, band ratioing and histogram-equalizing are carried out to emphasize the melting phenomena. Interestingly, a histogram-equalized single TM Band 5 image appears to be a good discriminator, leaving the melting phenomena as bright areas in the TM scene. The largest frozen “lake” is close to 1km wide while some of the drainage channels stretch more than 5 km. There is also a comparison of satellite-derived and in situ reflectance and temperature. The atmospheric corrected satellite data underestimate surface snow albedo by about 16% while TM measurements of surface temperature are 2° to 6°C lower than that measured on the ground.