Estimating Depth and Volume of Melt Pond Using ICESAT-2 and Multispectral Image Processing Over Eastern Antarctica

The Supraglacial lakes (SGL)/melt ponds are significant in ice sheet hydrology because they can reduce the albedo of the surface, allowing more melting to occur. The occurrence of blue ice and exposed rock, as well as the albedo-lowering feedback brought on by catastrophic winds, are all connected with the formation of SGL. Ice protects the Earth by acting as a shield and keeps it cool by reflecting excess heat into space. It is hard to understand glacier hydrology in East Antarctica despite it having ice shelves that are vulnerable and contains a high density of melt ponds. The proposed study is an attempt to quantify the melt pond volume over the Amery Ice Shelf (third among largest ice shelf in entire Antarctica) using the depth derived from the Image-based Radiative Transfer Model (RTM) and the ICESat-2 photon data. Melt ponds were found in the meridional part of the Amery Ice shelf, and understanding the melt pond dynamics plays an important role in predicting ice shelf cracks and breakages. In this study, we attempted to compare two methods for depth estimation and we observed that the RTM model was more accurate as ICESat-2 is not available all the time due to its large revisit time period and limited swath width.