Preliminary Terrasar-X observations for temperate glaciers on the Chamonix Mont Blanc test site

Due to their high temporal variability, monitoring temperate glaciers by in-situ measurements is quite hazardous. The new TerraSAR-X (TSX) sensor provides high resolution SAR data which can be acquired every 11 days in the same configuration and can cover the whole surface of several glaciers in a studied area. Their potential for temperate glacier monitoring by remote sensing has to be investigated. This paper presents some early results on the Argentie¿re glacier testsite in the Mont Blanc massif to estimate the surface velocity using some texture tracking methods. After having evaluated the Differential Interferometric SAR (DInSAR) potential with TSX Stripmap data, correlation and Maximum Likelihood (ML) based methods are performed on the texture variable extracted from the Spherically Invariant Random Vectors (SIRV) estimation scheme.