scholarly journals The Rofental: a high Alpine research basin (1890–3770 m a.s.l.) in the Ötztal Alps (Austria) with over 150 years of hydrometeorological and glaciological observations

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrich Strasser ◽  
Thomas Marke ◽  
Ludwig Braun ◽  
Heidi Escher-Vetter ◽  
Irmgard Juen ◽  
...  

Abstract. A comprehensive hydrometeorological and glaciological data set is presented, originating from a multitude of glaciological, meteorological, hydrological and laser scanning recordings at research sites in the Rofental (1891–3772 m a.s.l., Ötztal Alps, Austria). The data sets span a period of 150 years and hence represent a unique time series of rich high-altitude mountain observations. Their collection was originally initiated to support scientific investigation of the glaciers Hintereisferner, Kesselwandferner and Vernagtferner. Annual mass balance, glacier front variation, flow velocities and photographic records of the status of these glaciers were recorded. Later, additional measurements of meteorological and hydrological variables were undertaken, and over time a number of autonomous weather stations and runoff gauges were brought into operation; the available data now comprise records of temperature, relative humidity, short- and longwave radiation, wind speed and direction, air pressure, precipitation, and river water levels. Since 2001, a series of distributed (airborne and terrestrial) laser scans is available, along with associated digital surface models. In 2016 a permanent terrestrial laser scanner was installed on Im hintern Eis (3244 m a.s.l.) to continuously observe almost the entire area of Hintereisferner. The data and research undertaken at the sites of investigation in the Rofental area enable combined research of cryospheric, atmospheric and hydrological processes in complex terrain, and support the development of several state-of-the-art glacier mass balance and hydroclimatological models. The institutions taking part in the Rofental research framework promote their site in several international research initiatives. In INARCH (International Network for Alpine Research Catchment Hydrology, http://words.usask.ca/inarch), all original research data sets are now provided to the scientific community according to the Creative Commons Attribution License by means of the PANGAEA repository (https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.876120).

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrich Strasser ◽  
Thomas Marke ◽  
Ludwig Braun ◽  
Heidi Escher-Vetter ◽  
Irmgard Juen ◽  
...  

Abstract. A comprehensive hydrometeorological and glaciological data set is presented, originating from a multitude of recordings at several intensively operated research sites in the Rofental (1891–3772 m a.s.l., Ötztal Alps, Austria). The data sets are spanning a period of 150 years and hence represent a unique, worldwide unprecedented pool of high mountain observations. Their collection has originally been initiated to support the scientific investigation of the glaciers Hintereis-, Kesselwand- and Vernagtferner. Later, additional measurements of meteorological and hydrological variables have been undertaken; data now comprise records of temperature, relative humidity, short- and longwave radiation, wind speed and direction, air pressure, precipitation and water levels. For the glaciers, annual mass balance, glacier front variation and flow velocities as well as photographic images of the glacier status have been recorded. Since 2001, a series of distributed (airborne and terrestrial) laserscans has been processed. Most recently, a permanent terrestrial laser scanner installed on "Im hintern Eis" (3244 m a.s.l.) enables to continuously observe almost the entire area of Hintereisferner. The data and research undertaken at the sites of investigation enable combined research of atmospheric, cryospheric and hydrological processes in complex terrain, and support the development of several state-of-the art hydroclimatological and glacier mass balance models. The institutions taking part in the Rofental research framework have joined to a cooperation consortium and promote their site in several international research initiatives. In the framework of INARCH, all original research data sets are now provided to the scientific community according to the Creative Commons Attribution License by means of the PANGAEA repository (https://doi.org/doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.876120).


Author(s):  
J.-F. Hullo

We propose a complete methodology for the fine registration and referencing of kilo-station networks of terrestrial laser scanner data currently used for many valuable purposes such as 3D as-built reconstruction of Building Information Models (BIM) or industrial asbuilt mock-ups. This comprehensive target-based process aims to achieve the global tolerance below a few centimetres across a 3D network including more than 1,000 laser stations spread over 10 floors. This procedure is particularly valuable for 3D networks of indoor congested environments. In situ, the use of terrestrial laser scanners, the layout of the targets and the set-up of a topographic control network should comply with the expert methods specific to surveyors. Using parametric and reduced Gauss-Helmert models, the network is expressed as a set of functional constraints with a related stochastic model. During the post-processing phase inspired by geodesy methods, a robust cost function is minimised. At the scale of such a data set, the complexity of the 3D network is beyond comprehension. The surveyor, even an expert, must be supported, in his analysis, by digital and visual indicators. In addition to the standard indicators used for the adjustment methods, including Baarda’s reliability, we introduce spectral analysis tools of graph theory for identifying different types of errors or a lack of robustness of the system as well as <i>in fine</i> documenting the quality of the registration.


2022 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 272
Author(s):  
Chunhai Xu ◽  
Zhongqin Li ◽  
Feiteng Wang ◽  
Jianxin Mu ◽  
Xin Zhang

The eastern Tien Shan hosts substantial mid-latitude glaciers, but in situ glacier mass balance records are extremely sparse. Haxilegen Glacier No. 51 (eastern Tien Shan, China) is one of the very few well-measured glaciers, and comprehensive glaciological measurements were implemented from 1999 to 2011 and re-established in 2017. Mass balance of Haxilegen Glacier No. 51 (1999–2015) has recently been reported, but the mass balance record has not extended to the period before 1999. Here, we used a 1:50,000-scale topographic map and long-range terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) data to calculate the area, volume, and mass changes for Haxilegen Glacier No. 51 from 1964 to 2018. Haxilegen Glacier No. 51 lost 0.34 km2 (at a rate of 0.006 km2 a−1 or 0.42% a−1) of its area during the period 1964–2018. The glacier experienced clearly negative surface elevation changes and geodetic mass balance. Thinning occurred almost across the entire glacier surface, with a mean value of −0.43 ± 0.12 m a−1. The calculated average geodetic mass balance was −0.36 ± 0.12 m w.e. a−1. Without considering the error bounds of mass balance estimates, glacier mass loss over the past 50 years was in line with the observed and modeled mass balance (−0.37 ± 0.22 m w.e. a−1) that was published for short time intervals since 1999 but was slightly less negative than glacier mass loss in the entire eastern Tien Shan. Our results indicate that Riegl VZ®-6000 TLS can be widely used for mass balance measurements of unmonitored individual glaciers.


2009 ◽  
Vol 55 (190) ◽  
pp. 292-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Mölg ◽  
Nicolas J. Cullen ◽  
Georg Kaser

AbstractBroadband radiation schemes (parameterizations) are commonly used tools in glacier mass-balance modelling, but their performance at high altitude in the tropics has not been evaluated in detail. Here we take advantage of a high-quality 2 year record of global radiation (G ) and incoming longwave radiation (L ↓) measured on Kersten Glacier, Kilimanjaro, East Africa, at 5873 m a.s.l., to optimize parameterizations of G and L ↓. We show that the two radiation terms can be related by an effective cloud-cover fraction neff , so G or L ↓ can be modelled based on neff derived from measured L ↓ or G, respectively. At neff = 1, G is reduced to 35% of clear-sky G, and L ↓ increases by 45–65% (depending on altitude) relative to clear-sky L ↓. Validation for a 1 year dataset of G and L ↓ obtained at 4850 m on Glaciar Artesonraju, Peruvian Andes, yields a satisfactory performance of the radiation scheme. Whether this performance is acceptable for mass-balance studies of tropical glaciers is explored by applying the data from Glaciar Artesonraju to a physically based mass-balance model, which requires, among others, G and L ↓ as forcing variables. Uncertainties in modelled mass balance introduced by the radiation parameterizations do not exceed those that can be caused by errors in the radiation measurements. Hence, this paper provides a tool for inclusion in spatially distributed mass-balance modelling of tropical glaciers and/or extension of radiation data when only G or L ↓ is measured.


2000 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Heintzmann ◽  
G. Kreth ◽  
C. Cremer

Fluorescent confocal laser scanning microscopy allows an improved imaging of microscopic objects in three dimensions. However, the resolution along the axial direction is three times worse than the resolution in lateral directions. A method to overcome this axial limitation is tilting the object under the microscope, in a way that the direction of the optical axis points into different directions relative to the sample. A new technique for a simultaneous reconstruction from a number of such axial tomographic confocal data sets was developed and used for high resolution reconstruction of 3D‐data both from experimental and virtual microscopic data sets. The reconstructed images have a highly improved 3D resolution, which is comparable to the lateral resolution of a single deconvolved data set. Axial tomographic imaging in combination with simultaneous data reconstruction also opens the possibility for a more precise quantification of 3D data. The color images of this publication can be accessed from http://www.esacp.org/acp/2000/20‐1/heintzmann.htm. At this web address an interactive 3D viewer is additionally provided for browsing the 3D data. This java applet displays three orthogonal slices of the data set which are dynamically updated by user mouse clicks or keystrokes.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Stocker-Waldhuber ◽  
Andrea Fischer ◽  
Kay Helfricht ◽  
Michael Kuhn

Abstract. Climatic forcing affects glacier mass balance and ice flow dynamics on different time scales, resulting in length changes. Mass Balance and length changes are operationally used for glacier monitoring, whereas only a few time series of glacier dynamics have been recorded. With more than 100 years of measurements of ice flow velocities at stakes and stone lines on Hintereisferner and more than 50 years on Kesselwandferner, annual velocity and glacier fluctuation records have similar lengths. Subseasonal variations of ice flow velocities have been measured on Gepatschferner and Taschachferner for nearly a decade. The ice flow velocities on Hintereisferner and especially on Kesselwandferner show great variations between advancing and retreating periods, with magnitudes increasing from the highest to the lowest stakes, making ice flow records at ablation stakes a very sensitive indicator of glacier state. Since the end of the latest glacier advances from the 1970s to the 1980s, the ice flow velocities have decreased continuously, a strong indicator of the negative mass balances of the glaciers in recent decades. The velocity data sets of the four glaciers are available at https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.896741.


2021 ◽  
Vol 906 (1) ◽  
pp. 012091
Author(s):  
Petr Kalvoda ◽  
Jakub Nosek ◽  
Petra Kalvodova

Abstract Mobile mapping systems (MMS) are becoming widely used in standard geodetic tasks more commonly in the last years. The paper is focused on the influence of control points (CPs) number and configuration on mobile laser scanning accuracy. The mobile laser scanning (MLS) data was acquired by MMS RIEGL VMX-450. The resulting point cloud was compared with two different reference data sets. The first reference data set consisted of a high-accuracy test point field (TPF) measured by a Trimble R8s GNSS system and a Trimble S8 HP total station. The second reference data set was a point cloud from terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) using two Faro Focus3D X 130 laser scanners. The coordinates of both reference data sets were determined with significantly higher accuracy than the coordinates of the tested MLS point cloud. The accuracy testing is based on coordinate differences between the reference data set and the tested MLS point cloud. There is a minimum number of 6–7 CPs in our scanned area (based on MLS trajectory length) to achieve the declared relative accuracy of trajectory positioning according to the RIEGL datasheet. We tested two types of ground control point (GCP) configurations for 7 GCPs, using TPF reference data. The first type is a trajectory-based CPs configuration, and the second is a geometry-based CPs configuration. The accuracy differences of the MLS point clouds with trajectory-based CPs configuration and geometry-based CPs configuration are not statistically significant. From a practical perspective, a geometry-based CPs configuration is more advantageous in the nonlinear type of urban area such as our one. The following analyzes are performed on geometry-based CPs configuration variants. We tested the influence of changing the location of two CPs from ground to roof. The effect of the vertical configuration of the CPs on the accuracy of the tested MLS point cloud has not been demonstrated. The effect of the number of control points on the accuracy of the MLS point cloud was also tested. In the overall statistics using TPF, the accuracy increases significantly with increasing the number of GCPs up to 6. This number corresponds to a requirement of the manufacturer. Although further increasing the number of CPs does not significantly increase the global accuracy, local accuracy improves with increasing the number of CPs up to 10 (average spacing 50 m) according to the comparison with the TLS reference point cloud. The accuracy test of the MLS point cloud was divided into the horizontal accuracy test on the façade data subset and the vertical accuracy test on the road data subset using the TLS reference point cloud. The results of this paper can help improve the efficiency and accuracy of the mobile mapping process in geodetic praxis.


2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 447-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Machguth ◽  
R. S. Purves ◽  
J. Oerlemans ◽  
M. Hoelzle ◽  
F. Paul

Abstract. By means of Monte Carlo simulations we calculated uncertainty in modelled cumulative mass balance over 400 days at one particular point on the tongue of Morteratsch Glacier, Switzerland, using a glacier energy balance model of intermediate complexity. Before uncertainty assessment, the model was tuned to observed mass balance for the investigated time period and its robustness was tested by comparing observed and modelled mass balance over 11 years, yielding very small deviations. Both systematic and random uncertainties are assigned to twelve input parameters and their respective values estimated from the literature or from available meteorological data sets. The calculated overall uncertainty in the model output is dominated by systematic errors and amounts to 0.7 m w.e. or approximately 10% of total melt over the investigated time span. In order to provide a first order estimate on variability in uncertainty depending on the quality of input data, we conducted a further experiment, calculating overall uncertainty for different levels of uncertainty in measured global radiation and air temperature. Our results show that the output of a well calibrated model is subject to considerable uncertainties, in particular when applied for extrapolation in time and space where systematic errors are likely to be an important issue.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Shehata ◽  
Hideki Mizunaga

&lt;p&gt;Long-period magnetotelluric and gravity data were acquired to investigate the US cordillera's crustal structure. The magnetotelluric data are being acquired across the continental USA on a quasi-regular grid of &amp;#8764;70 km spacing as an electromagnetic component of the National Science Foundation EarthScope/USArray Program. International Gravimetreique Bureau compiled gravity Data at high spatial resolution. Due to the difference in data coverage density, the geostatistical joint integration was utilized to map the subsurface structures with adequate resolution. First, a three-dimensional inversion of each data set was applied separately.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The inversion results of both data sets show a similarity of structure for data structuralizing. The individual result of both data sets is resampled at the same locations using the kriging method by considering each inversion model to estimate the coefficient. Then, the Layer Density Correction (LDC) process's enhanced density distribution was applied to MT data's spatial expansion process. Simple Kriging with varying Local Means (SKLM) was applied to the residual analysis and integration. For this purpose, the varying local means of the resistivity were estimated using the corrected gravity data by the Non-Linear Indicator Transform (NLIT), taking into account the spatial correlation. After that, the spatial expansion analysis of MT data obtained sparsely was attempted using the estimated local mean values and SKLM method at the sections where the MT survey was carried out and for the entire area where density distributions exist. This research presents the integration results and the stand-alone inversion results of three-dimensional gravity and magnetotelluric data.&lt;/p&gt;


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Podgórski ◽  
Christophe Kinnard ◽  
Michał Pętlicki ◽  
Roberto Urrutia

TanDEM-X digital elevation model (DEM) is a global DEM released by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) at outstanding resolution of 12 m. However, the procedure for its creation involves the combination of several DEMs from acquisitions spread between 2011 and 2014, which casts doubt on its value for precise glaciological change detection studies. In this work we present TanDEM-X DEM as a high-quality product ready for use in glaciological studies. We compare it to Aerial Laser Scanning (ALS)-based dataset from April 2013 (1 m), used as the ground-truth reference, and Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) V003 DEM and SRTM v3 DEM (both 30 m), serving as representations of past glacier states. We use a method of sub-pixel coregistration of DEMs by Nuth and Kääb (2011) to determine the geometric accuracy of the products. In addition, we propose a slope-aspect heatmap-based workflow to remove the errors resulting from radar shadowing over steep terrain. Elevation difference maps obtained by subtraction of DEMs are analyzed to obtain accuracy assessments and glacier mass balance reconstructions. The vertical accuracy (± standard deviation) of TanDEM-X DEM over non-glacierized area is very good at 0.02 ± 3.48 m. Nevertheless, steep areas introduce large errors and their filtering is required for reliable results. The 30 m version of TanDEM-X DEM performs worse than the finer product, but its accuracy, −0.08 ± 7.57 m, is better than that of SRTM and ASTER. The ASTER DEM contains errors, possibly resulting from imperfect DEM creation from stereopairs over uniform ice surface. Universidad Glacier has been losing mass at a rate of −0.44 ± 0.08 m of water equivalent per year between 2000 and 2013. This value is in general agreement with previously reported mass balance estimated with the glaciological method for 2012–2014.


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