A monitoring system for glaciers on Svalbard based on Envisat ASAR wide swath data

In this paper, we propose a method to monitor the extent of different facies on glaciers on Svalbard. The extent of the firn facies can be used as an indicator for trends in mass balance. We produce an averaged image from Envisat ASAR wide swath mode scenes for an entire winter season. The averaged image is segmented into three classes using a Gaussian Mixture Model. The method is able to detect the area covered by firn for years when the glacier has negative or zero mass balance, while quantitative results are difficult to achieve for years with positive mass balance.