Monitoring glacier elevation and volume changes with digital photogrammetry and GIS at Gepatschferner glacier, Austria

Abstract

Digital elevation models of Gepatschferner in Northern Tyrol, Austria were obtained with digital photogrammetry from high altitude stereo photo pairs and by digitizing an analogue topographic glacier map, for 1990 and 1971, respectively. A difference map was calculated to identify regions of glacier elevation increases and decreases corresponding to glacier mass gain and loss. While the glacier tongue below 2600 m showed mainly increases in glacier surface elevation as compared to 1971, the remaining glacier thickness experienced both increases and decreases. The accumulation zone above 3200 m contained several extreme cases of morphological features with altitude changes>+30 m. While the increased ice thickness of the glacier tongue can be traced to a well documented period of mass accumulation in the 1970s, changes in glacier surface elevation in the higher zones may be linked either to the morphology of the glacier bed or to differences in insolation on the glacier surface. Between 1971 and 1990 the glacier experienced a net loss of 26×10⁶ m³ corresponding to approximately 0.9% of the entire glacier volume.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank H. Rentsch of the Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing of the Technical University Munich, Germany, who kindly provided the original transparencies of the aerial images and Mike J. Smith, Kingston University, for helpful comments.