Combined Use of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 for Glacier Mapping: An Application Over Central East Alps

The systematic monitoring of glaciers is essential to both evaluate water resources availability and better understand the effects climate change. increased speed glacier changes observed in last years requires a more frequent update inventories than past; however, high human supervision required by state-of-the-art techniques discouraging their application over large areas. This paper proposes novel approach exploit volume data provided Copernicus Sentinel missions for detecting outlines, including debris-covered glaciers. In detail, our method exploits Sentinel-1 Sentinel-2 multi-temporal images build composite image representing conditions during yearly maximum ablation period. multispectral are classified with support vector machine (SVM) composed mosaic that represents information ablation. At same time, time series exploited multitemporal coherence all snow covered glaciated areas together moving surfaces. used Sentinal-2 detect part proposed was tested Central-East Alps presented an overall accuracy 92% respect reference inventory South Tyrol agreement 90% latest from Sentinel-2. enables assist experts identifying outlines short time.