Crack Propagation and Calving Front Monitoring Using SATO Filter

Ice shelves, the floating extensions of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, are important regulators of the ice discharge and need to be monitored. Among others, calving processes and fractures control their ability to restrain the upward ice flow. While models integrate calving laws, their comparison with observations is still sparse and is mainly performed through visual inspection. In the present work, we hypothesized that the combination of high revisit rate SAR remote sensing products with medical imaging techniques can automatically detect cracks and monitor the calving front location. We focused our study on the Pine Island Glacier, in the Amundsen Sea Sector, with Sentinel-1 data over the period 2017 to 2020. Results show that the Sato filtering technique managed to precisely delineate the calving front, the icebergs, and the fractures on the ice shelf.