Decadal changes from a multi-temporal glacier inventory of Svalbard

Abstract

We present a multi-temporal digital inventory of Svalbard glaciers with the most recent from the late 2000s containing 33 775 km² of glaciers, or 57% of the total land area of the archipelago. At present, 68% of the glaciated area of Svalbard drains through tidewater glaciers that have a summed terminus width of ~ 740 km. The glaciated area over the entire archipelago has decreased by an average of 80 km² a^−1 over the past ~ 30 yr, representing a reduction of 7%. For a sample of ~ 400 glaciers (10 000 km²) in the south and west of Spitsbergen, three digital inventories are available from 1930/60s, 1990 and 2007 from which we calculate average changes during 2 epochs. In the more recent epoch, the terminus retreat was larger than in the earlier epoch while area shrinkage was smaller. The contrasting pattern may be explained by the decreased lateral wastage of the glacier tongues. Temporal retreat rates for individual glaciers show a mix of accelerating and decelerating trends, reflecting the large spatial variability of glacier types and climatic/dynamic response times in Svalbard. Last, retreat rates estimated by dividing glacier area changes by the tongue width are larger than centerline retreat due to a more encompassing frontal change estimate with inclusion of lateral area loss

Vegetation diversity and selected abiotic factors influencing the primary succession process on the foreland of Gåsbreen, Svalbard

“…Ziaja and Ostafin 2007;Ziaja et al 2016a) indicate the intensification of the recession process from the 1980s onwards. Glacier volume has decreased, especially on western Svalbard (Kohler et al 2007;James et al 2012;Nuth et al 2013).…”

Decadal Scale Changes in Glacier Area in the Hohe Tauern National Park (Austria) Determined by Object-Based Image Analysis

“…Firstly, we calculated simple percentage deviations (between OBIA_2003 and 2003_GLIMS, and OBIA_2013 and Man_2013 respectively). Although this is not a highly sophisticated method for assessing the accuracy of an image classification, it is widely used within the field of glaciology (for example [18,45]). In addition we assessed the accuracy using a confusion matrix following the methodology described by [46].…”

An Inter-Comparison of Techniques for Determining Velocities of Maritime Arctic Glaciers, Svalbard, Using Radarsat-2 Wide Fine Mode Data

“…We used different matching window and step sizes depending on the resolution of the SLC data to achieve in all cases a search window of~800 × 800 m and a resolution of the final velocity map of 100 m ( Table 2). The results are then georeferenced using a smoothed version of the ASTER GDEM digital elevation model (DEM) [31].…”