LANDFAST ICEBERG HEIGHT RETRIEVAL AND EVALUATION BASED ON REMOTE SENSING APPROACHES IN ANTARCTICA

Abstract

Icebergs are one of the important components of Antarctic ice loss, and their spatial distribution and volume changes have a profound impact on ocean circulation, sea ice formation, freshwater balance and carbon cycle in the Southern Ocean, and ship navigation. Therefore, effective monitoring of icebergs is of great significance. Iceberg height is an important parameter of iceberg volume, and its accurate estimation is crucial to the calculation of iceberg thickness and volume. In this paper, based on optical satellite images, satellite altimetry data and digital surface model (DSM) derived from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), the iceberg height retrieval approaches were studied, including shadow based, satellite altimetry based and DSM based methods. Then, the results of different approaches were evaluated and analyzed by taking icebergs in the landfast ice area as an example. Finally, we concluded that all three methods could effectively extract the height information of icebergs. For the shadow-height method with relatively low accuracy, lower sun altitude and higher icebergs would be more conducive to accurate height estimation.