Amery Ice Shelf Digital Elevation Model from GLAS and GMT

The geoscience laser altimeter system (GLAS) on the ice cloud and land elevation satellite spacecraft provided a large amount of data on the topography of polar ice area. It is possible to create high resolution digital elevation models (DEMs) from this data by using data interpolation techniques. Five interpolation algorithms were picked to be tested on GLAS data by employing the Generic Mapping Tools and Surfer: nearest neighbor interpolation, surface, triangular, block kriging, and inverse distance to a power. These methods were applied to the GLAS data of Amery ice shelf for qualitative analysis. We calculated the mean absolute error between the interpolated DEM and the original data. Also, execution speeds were measured for the five algorithms. The surface method shows high performance both quantitatively and qualitatively to other methods tested.