Validation for Ice Flow Velocity of Shirase Glacier Derived from PALSAR-2 Image Correlation

Shirase Glacier is known to one of the fastest ice streams in Antarctic glaciers, and it is important to monitor the flow velocity of the glacier because of understanding the discharge of ice mass in Antarctica. The authors have shown that the flow velocity of Shirase Glacier can be estimated by applying the image correlation method to the amplitude images derived from the Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar type 2 (PALSAR-2) onboard the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 (ALOS-2) [1]. In this paper, we show the validation results of the estimated flow velocity applied the image correlation method to the PALSAR-2 data, based on the flow velocity measured from the latitude and longitude information using the GNSS receiver on the ice radar (ApRES) simultaneously with the PALSAR-2 observation. As a result, the RMS error between the measured and estimated flow velocity of Shirase Glacier was 0.046 km a−1, and the estimated flow velocity obtained using the image correlation method applied to the PALSAR-2 data is proved to be in good agreement with the ground truth.