Assessing the Glacier Boundaries in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau of China by Multi-Temporal Coherence Estimation with Sentinel-1A InSAR

The sensitivity of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) coherence has been applied in delineating the boundaries of alpine glaciers because it is nearly unaffected by cloud coverage and can collect data day and night. However, very limited work with application of SAR data has been performed for the alpine glaciers in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) of China. In this study, we attempted to investigate the change of coherence level in alpine glacier zone and access the glacier boundaries in the QTP using time series of Sentinel-1A SAR images. The DaDongkemadi Glacier (DDG) in the central QTP was selected as the study area with land cover mainly classified into wet snow, ice, river outwash and soil land. We utilized 45 Sentinel-1A C-band SAR images collected during October of 2014 through January of 2018 over the DDG to generate time series of interferometric coherence maps, and to further extract the DDG boundaries. Based on the spatiotemporal analysis of coherence values in the selected sampling areas, we first determined the threshold as 0.7 for distinguishing among different ground targets and then extracted the DDG boundaries through threshold-based segmentation and edge detection. The validation was performed by comparing the DDG boundaries extracted from the coherence maps with those extracted from the Sentinel-2B optical image. The testing results show that the wet snow and ice present a relatively low level of coherence (about 0.5), while the river outwash and the soil land present a higher level of coherence (0.8–1.0). It was found that the coherence maps spanning between June and September (i.e., the glacier ablation period) are the most suitable for identifying the snow- and ice-covered areas. When compared with the boundary detected using optical image, the mean value of Jaccard similarity coefficient for the total areas within the DDG boundaries derived from the coherence maps selected around July, August and September reached up to 0.9010. In contrast, the mean value from the coherence maps selected around December was relatively lower (0.8862). However, the coherence maps around December were the most suitable for distinguishing the ice from the river outwash around the DDG terminus, as the river outwash areas could hardly be differentiated from the ice-covered areas from June through September. The correlation analysis performed by using the meteorological data (i.e., air temperature and precipitation records) suggests that the air temperature and precipitation have a more significant influence on the coherence level of the ice and river outwash than the wet snow and soil land. The proposed method, applied efficiently in this study, shows the potential of multi-temporal coherence estimation from the Sentinel-1A mission to access the boundaries of alpine glaciers on a larger scale in the QTP.