UAV photogrammetry and structure from motion to assess calving dynamics at Store Glacier, a large outlet draining the Greenland ice sheet

Abstract

Abstract. This study presents the application of a costeffective, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to investigate calving dynamics at a major marine-terminating outlet glacier draining the western sector of the Greenland ice sheet. The UAV was flown over Store Glacier on three sorties during summer 2013 and acquired over 2000 overlapping, geotagged images of the calving front at an ∼ 40 cm ground sampling distance. Stereo-photogrammetry applied to these images enabled the extraction of high-resolution digital elevation models (DEMs) with vertical accuracies of ± 1.9 m which were used to quantify glaciological processes from early July to late August 2013. The central zone of the calving front advanced by ∼ 500 m, whilst the lateral margins remained stable. The orientation of crevasses and the surface velocity field derived from feature tracking indicates that lateral drag is the primary resistive force and that ice flow varies across the calving front from 2.5 m d −1 at the margins to in excess of 16 m d −1 at the centreline. Ice flux through the calving front is 3.8 × 10 7 m 3 d −1 , equivalent to 13.9 Gt a −1 and comparable to flux-gate estimates of Store Glacier's annual discharge. Water-filled crevasses were present throughout the observation period but covered a limited area of between 0.025 and 0.24 % of the terminus and did not appear to exert any significant control over fracture or calving. We conclude that the use of repeat UAV surveys coupled with the processing techniques outlined in this paper have great potential for elucidating the complex frontal dynamics that characterise large calving outlet glaciers.

Application of Low-Cost Fixed-Wing UAV for Inland Lakes Shoreline Investigation

“…Using UAVs is now widespread across a range of disciplines (Anderson and Gaston 2013;Liu et al 2014;Smith et al 2016). The most popular environmental applications are: landslide monitoring (Lucieer et al 2014a), measuring changes in coastal morphology (Casella et al 2014;Gonçalves and Henriques 2015;Papakonstantinou et al 2016), monitoring glacier movement (Immerzeel et al 2014;Ryan et al 2015), studying Antarctic moss beds (Lucieer et al 2014b), soil erosion monitoring (d'Oleire-Oltmanns et al 2012), fluvial geomorphology (Mori et al 2002;Tamminga et al 2015;Woodget et al 2015) and forest research (Tang and Shao 2015;Wallace et al 2012). These studies are conducted using different UAV platforms delivered by various manufacturers (i.e., hybrid, flapping-wing, fixed-wing, coaxial, duct-fan, single rotor, and multi-rotor).…”

Review article: the use of remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPASs) for natural hazards monitoring and management

“…Environmental and geological monitoring can profit from fast multi-temporal acquisitions delivering high-resolution images (Thamm and Judex, 2006;Niethammer et al, 2010). RPASs can also be considered a good solution for mapping and monitoring different active processes at the earth's surface (Fonstad et al, 2013;Piras et al, 2017;Feurer et al, 2017;Hayakawa et al, 2018) such as at glaciers (Immerzeel et al, 2014;Ryan et al, 2015;Fugazza et al, 2017), Antarctic moss beds (Lucieer et al, 2014b), coastal areas (Delacourt et al, 2009;Klemas, 2015), interseismic deformations (Deffontaines et al, 2017(Deffontaines et al, , 2018 and in river morphodynamics (Gomez and Purdie, 2016;Jaud et al, 2016;Aicardi et al, 2017;Bolognesi et al, 2016;Benassai et al, 2017), debris flows (Wen et al, 2011) and river channel vegetation (Dunford et al, 2009).…”

Three Decades of Volume Change of a Small Greenlandic Glacier Using Ground Penetrating Radar, Structure from Motion, and Aerial Photogrammetry

“…Several authors tested SfM for glacier DEM reconstruction, demonstrating that this method, using only a consumer level camera and a differential GPS, is capable of achieving precision and resolution comparable to laser scanning techniques (Piermattei et al, 2015;Ryan et al, 2015;Thomson and Copland, 2016). Although often coupled with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), low cost ground-based SfM surveys were also carried out taking advantage of natural viewpoints and small size of study sites (<0.1 km 2 ) (Westoby et al, 2012;Piermattei et al, 2015).…”

“…In recent years, so called Structure from Motion (SfM) has gained popularity as a tool to produce DEMs, as the technique offers high resolution and accurate elevation data at minimal costs (e.g., Westoby et al, 2012;Fonstad et al, 2013;Smith et al, 2016). The technique thus provides the possibility to determine geodetic mass balance for glaciers in Greenland where contemporary data of surface height are lacking (Piermattei et al, 2015;Ryan et al, 2015;Thomson and Copland, 2016).…”