Title
Subglacial water presence classification from polar radar data
Abstract
Ground and airborne radar depth-sounding of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been used for many years to remotely determine characteristics such as ice thickness, subglacial topography, and mass balance of large bodies of ice. Ice coring efforts have supported these radar data to provide ground truth for validation of the state (wet or frozen) of the interface between the bottom of the ice sheet and the underlying bedrock. Subglacial state governs the friction, flow speed, transport of material, and overall change of the ice sheet. In this paper, we utilize machine learning and classifier combination to model water presence from airborne polar radar data acquired on Greenland in 1999 and 2007. The underlying method results in radar independence, allowing model transfer from 1999 to 2007 radar data to produce water presence maps of the Greenland ice sheet with differing radars. We focus on how to construct a successful set of classifiers capable of high classification accuracy. Utilizing multiple machine learning algorithms is shown to be successful for this classification problem, achieving 86% classification accuracy in the best case. Several heuristics are presented for constructing teams of multiple classifiers for predicting subglacial water presence. The presented methodology could also be applied to radar data acquired over the Antarctic ice sheet.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1016/j.engappai.2011.12.002
Eng. Appl. of AI
Keywords
Field
DocType
antarctic ice sheet,radar data,airborne radar,classification accuracy,ice thickness,greenland ice sheet,classification problem,ice sheet,radar independence,subglacial water presence classification,airborne polar radar data,machine learning,pattern recognition
Radar,Antarctic ice sheet,Coring,Computer science,Greenland ice sheet,Remote sensing,Ice sheet,Ground truth,Artificial intelligence,Bedrock,Polar,Machine learning
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
25
4
0952-1976
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.39
15
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Christopher M. Gifford1445.76
Arvin Agah239754.11