Brief communication: Detection of glacier surge activity using cloud computing of Sentinel-1 radar data

Abstract

For studying the flow of glaciers and their response to climate change it is important to detect glacier surges. Here, we compute within Google Earth Engine the normalized differences between winter maxima of Sentinel-1 C-band radar backscatter image stacks over subsequent years. We arrive at a global map of annual backscatter changes, which are for glaciers in most cases related to changed crevassing associated with surge-type activity. For our demonstration period 2018–2019 we detected 69 surging glaciers, with many of them not classified so far as surge type. Comparison with glacier surface velocities shows that we reliably find known surge activities. Our method can support operational monitoring of glacier surges and some other special events such as large rock and snow avalanches.