Surface Displacement Measurement from Remote Sensing Images

11Remote Sensing of Glacier Motion

Amaury DEHECQ^1,2, Bas ALTENA³, Alex S. GARDNER^4, Emmanuel TROUVÉ⁵ and Silvan LEINSS^5,6

¹Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology (VAW), ETH Zurich, Switzerland

²IGE, CNRS, IRD, INP, Grenoble Alpes University, France

³IMAU, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

⁴NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA

⁵LISTIC, Savoie Mont Blanc University, Annecy, France

⁶Institute of Environmental Engineering, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

11.1. Introduction

The Earth’s frozen water, composed of seasonal snow, sea ice, lake ice, river ice, glaciers and permafrost, makes up the cryosphere. This chapter focuses on the observation of the Earth’s glacier ice, which is found in the large Antarctic and Greenlandic ice sheets, in ice caps, in icefields and in valley glaciers.

Glaciers cover about 10% of Earth’s land area and make up two-thirds of the world’s freshwater resources (International Panel on Climate Change 2019). They play a key role in the Earth energy balance by reflecting solar radiation and through melting, which in turn cools the ocean and atmosphere. Glaciers are an important part of the water cycle, storing water in the form of snow and ice that is then released to streams, groundwater and the oceans during warm periods. As glaciers are highly sensitive to changes in climate, they are an iconic representation of human-induced climate warming, with impacts reaching far beyond their regional extent. Indeed, ...