HD maps of 'the Greenland Ice Sheet' coming soon

Scientists are working on turning the present satellite images of the Greenland Ice Sheet into high definition quality elevation maps.

The Ohio State University has partnered with the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota to turn images captured by DigitalGlobe's Worldview-1 and 2 satellites into publicly available highest-resolution images ever, that researchers can use to track the ice.

And while each individual pixel represents only one moment in time, taken together they show the ice sheet as a kind of living body-flowing, crumbling and melting out to sea.

Ian Howat, associate professor of earth sciences at Ohio State, said that the access to DigitalGlobe's imagery was one of the biggest breakthroughs for earth science satellite capabilities in decades, adding that it had only been a few years since they had gotten access to really high-resolution imagery from government agencies, and were already discovering new things about the ice sheet.

The imagery starts out at a resolution of about 0.5 meters. The researchers then turn it into digital elevation maps with a resolution of 2 meters.

With hundreds of terabytes of polar data already collected and additional surface area equivalent to the state of Missouri being collected every day, the researchers are steadily processing it all with new Ohio State software called SETSM (for Surface Extraction from TIN-based Search Minimization). Ohio State research associate Myoung-Jong Noh created the software, which builds 1-gigabyte "tiles" representing regions 7 kilometers on a side and assembles them into mosaics depicting land, sea and ice elevation.

For example, icebergs that have calved off the edge of the glacier were visible floating out to sea-but so were cracks hundreds of kilometers inland from Jakobshavn, on what would otherwise be a flat expanse of ice.

Any research that relies on measuring changes in the Earth's surface, including studies of volcanoes and coastal erosion, would benefit from elevation data produced by the SETSM software, Howat said.

Of the many Ohio State projects that draw upon OSC resources, SETSM is one of the largest. The researchers hope to expand the project to NASA's Pleiades supercomputer starting in 2015.

The study was presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU).