Detecting short-term surface melt over Vestre Broggerbreen, Arctic glacier using indigenously developed unmanned air vehicles

Abstract

In the Arctic, the impacts of global warming are strong and the rate of ice melting is increasingly accelerating due to warmer temperatures relative to snow accumulation. With recent advances in unmanned air vehicle (UAV) technology and image processing techniques, field measurements for cryosphere studies have gained significance today. In the current report, an attempt is being made to measure glacier surface melt over a four-day period using UAV acquisitions and field measurements to improve India's scientific credentials in polar science. Two aerial surveys were performed on 14 and 17 September 2019 using an indigenous Quadcopter UAV over a portion of the Ablation area of Vestre Broggerbreen glacier, Svalbard, Arctic. To measure precise surface melt, surface topography reconstructed from the acquired aerial images is processed. Results concluded that a surface melt was observed ranging from 0.013 to 0.065 m, which agreed with the measurements in situ.

Keywords:

• Surface melt
• UAV
• glacier
• polar
• global warming
• snow

Acknowledgements

National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India, Goa has supported the logistical access to Ny-Ålesund to carry out this scientific research work. Authors also thank Drone Aerospace Systems Pvt. Ltd., Sierra Aerospace, and CIIRC-Jyothy Institute of Technology, Bengaluru, Karnataka for supporting the research work.

Data availability

The dataset utilized/analyzed during the current study will be available from the corresponding author upon request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.