DOI: 10.15489/kel9qeeou202

Individual glacier catchments support a quantification of glacier changes for a specified region and are therefore an important tool in the field of glaciology and hydrology. The Antarctic drainage basins provide detailed information for partitioning mass changes of the ice sheet to the individual glacier or regional level.

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Input data: In the modified watershed approach ice sheet wide velocity measurements by Sentinel-1 SAR (Nagler et al., 2015) and the 90 m TanDEM-X Polar DEM (Wessel et al., 2021) are combined to derive individual glacier drainage basins for the entire Antarctic Ice Sheet. The algorithm is seeded at the grounding line (Mouginot et al., 2017)

Originating from selected seed points at the grounding line we produced discrete stream lines based on the methodology of (Cabral et al., 1993) for all areas exceeding a threshold of 50 m/yr and followed these upstream. For slower areas a classical flood-filling watershed algorithm is adopted (Beucher et al., 1992). A Monte Carlo simulation was performed, repeating the catchment delineation procedure 5000 times to account for uncertainties. The final catchment label was then determined by selecting the label that emerged as the majority outcome across all simulations. For processing details please consult (Krieger et al., 2020).

The methodology has been validated in the Northeast Greenland sector by comparing the basin extent to existing delineations in the literature. Marginal discrepancies in catchment area arise for various reasons, including the choice of the DEM, the velocity dataset or the used methodology. As an independent, high accuracy data base for full validation of the results is lacking, quality assessment was supported by performing an intercomparsion with different input data combinations of DEMs and ice velocity products showing discrepancies of up to 16% in the extent of the catchment area. The quality of the presented results was further assessed by a probability measure from additional Monte-Carlo experiment.

Dataset

ISO 19115-1:2014/19139