INDIAN INLAND WATER AND PARTS OF ANTARCTIC ICE SHEET ELEVATION AND ICE SHEET VELOCITY MONITORING USING ALTIMETRY AND SAR BASED DATASETS

Abstract

The monitoring of inland water and continental ice sheets is very important from water management and global climate related studies. The current study utilizes the SGDR data from Saral-Altika during 2013–2017 to estimate and monitor water level in 24 major reservoirs of India. The R2 value for majority of reservoirs was more than 0.99 and RMSE error value also was less than 0.40 m. In addition, wide rivers of India such as Mahanadi River, was also monitored using Altika data covering part of Mahanadi River from Khairmal to Naraj gauging sites during 2013–2016 time period. One dimensional hydro-dynamic (1D-HD) model was setup for this part of river to generate river Discharge at virtual gauge. The part of Antarctic ice sheet South of Indian research station Maitri, East Antarctica, was studied for ice sheet elevation changes using ground based stake network as well as space based altimeter/LIDAR datasets during 2003–2017 time period. 2003–2009 time was used for getting elevation changes using Icesat-1 level 2 altimetry product, and Geophysical Data Record (GDR) data from Altika was used with slope correction from 2013–2016 time period. An extensive network of ground based stake networks were used for validating the derived elevation changes. The ice sheet and glacier line of site velocity was estimated using Sentinel-1 based InSAR data with 6 to 12 day time interval data sets for year 2016 and 2017. The derived glacier velocity was comparable with optical image (Landsat-8) based glacier velocity for same year and also with historical Radarsat-1 based glacier velocity results.