TY - JOUR

T1 - TermPicks

T2 - a century of Greenland glacier terminus data for use in scientific and machine learning applications

AU - Goliber, Sophie

AU - Black, Taryn

AU - Catania, Ginny

AU - Lea, James M.

AU - Olsen, Helene

AU - Cheng, Daniel

AU - Bevan, Suzanne

AU - Bjørk, Anders

AU - Bunce, Charlie

AU - Brough, Stephen

AU - Carr, J. Rachel

AU - Cowton, Tom

AU - Gardner, Alex

AU - Fahrner, Dominik

AU - Hill, Emily

AU - Joughin, Ian

AU - Korsgaard, Niels J.

AU - Luckman, Adrian

AU - Moon, Twila

AU - Murray, Tavi

AU - Sole, Andrew

AU - Wood, Michael

AU - Zhang, Enze

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

N2 - Marine-terminating outlet glacier terminus traces, mapped from satellite and aerial imagery, have been used extensively in understanding how outlet glaciers adjust to climate change variability over a range of timescales. Numerous studies have digitized termini manually, but this process is labor intensive, and no consistent approach exists. A lack of coordination leads to duplication of efforts, particularly for Greenland, which is a major scientific research focus. At the same time, machine learning techniques are rapidly making progress in their ability to automate accurate extraction of glacier termini, with promising developments across a number of optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite sensors. These techniques rely on high-quality, manually digitized terminus traces to be used as training data for robust automatic traces. Here we present a database of manually digitized terminus traces for machine learning and scientific applications. These data have been collected, cleaned, assigned with appropriate metadata including image scenes, and compiled so they can be easily accessed by scientists. The TermPicks data set includes 39 060 individual terminus traces for 278 glaciers with a mean of 136 +/- 190 and median of 93 of traces per glacier. Across all glaciers, 32 567 dates have been digitized, of which 4467 have traces from more than one author, and there is a duplication rate of 17 %. We find a median error of similar to 100 m among manually traced termini. Most traces are obtained after 1999, when Landsat 7 was launched. We also provide an overview of an updated version of the Google Earth Engine Digitization Tool (GEEDiT), which has been developed specifically for future manual picking of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

AB - Marine-terminating outlet glacier terminus traces, mapped from satellite and aerial imagery, have been used extensively in understanding how outlet glaciers adjust to climate change variability over a range of timescales. Numerous studies have digitized termini manually, but this process is labor intensive, and no consistent approach exists. A lack of coordination leads to duplication of efforts, particularly for Greenland, which is a major scientific research focus. At the same time, machine learning techniques are rapidly making progress in their ability to automate accurate extraction of glacier termini, with promising developments across a number of optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite sensors. These techniques rely on high-quality, manually digitized terminus traces to be used as training data for robust automatic traces. Here we present a database of manually digitized terminus traces for machine learning and scientific applications. These data have been collected, cleaned, assigned with appropriate metadata including image scenes, and compiled so they can be easily accessed by scientists. The TermPicks data set includes 39 060 individual terminus traces for 278 glaciers with a mean of 136 +/- 190 and median of 93 of traces per glacier. Across all glaciers, 32 567 dates have been digitized, of which 4467 have traces from more than one author, and there is a duplication rate of 17 %. We find a median error of similar to 100 m among manually traced termini. Most traces are obtained after 1999, when Landsat 7 was launched. We also provide an overview of an updated version of the Google Earth Engine Digitization Tool (GEEDiT), which has been developed specifically for future manual picking of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

KW - TERMINATING OUTLET GLACIERS

KW - MULTI-DECADAL RETREAT

KW - TIDEWATER GLACIER

KW - CALVING FRONT

KW - SURFACE ELEVATION

KW - JAKOBSHAVN ISBRAE

KW - ICE MELANGE

KW - DYNAMICS

KW - FLUCTUATIONS

KW - DISCHARGE

U2 - 10.5194/tc-16-3215-2022

DO - 10.5194/tc-16-3215-2022

M3 - Journal article

VL - 16

SP - 3215

EP - 3233

JO - The Cryosphere

JF - The Cryosphere

SN - 1994-0416

IS - 8

ER -