Spatial and temporal glacier zone variability on the Canadian Arctic Archipelago from 2017 to 2023 using TerraSAR-X

Abstract

The rise in air temperatures caused by climate change has a direct impact on the melting of glaciers. Due to the fourfold rise in air temperature in the Arctic, the glaciers there are more severely affected. We present a high temporal time series of radar glacier zone of Axel Heiberg, Devon Ice Cap, and Manson Icefield located in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago from May 2017 to September 2023 based on TerraSAR-X ScanSAR data. In addition, we used the air temperature from automatic weather stations to analyse their effects on the variation of the glacier zone. For the mapping of the radar glacier zones, we compared the threshold values determined by the k-means clustering, expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm, and histogram analysis with maximum detection. Due to their robustness against outliers and their better consistency with the literature, the values of the histogram analysis were used. We observed no linear trend in the air temperature or in the glacier radar zones, but a year-to-year variation with the largest air temperatures in summer 2019, 2020, and 2023 in Svartevaeg and in 2019 and 2020 in Grise Fiord and a maximum in the wet snow zone in Axel Heiberg in 2019 (67%) and on Devon Ice Cap in 2019 (73%) and 2020 (80%) and on Manson Icefield in 2019 (65%).