Dual-satellite (Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8) remote sensing of supraglacial lakes in Greenland

Williamson, Andrew G.; Banwell, Alison F.; Willis, Ian C.; Arnold, Neil S.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-12-3045-2018

Articles | Volume 12, issue 9

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-12-3045-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-12-3045-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 12, issue 9

Research article

|

26 Sep 2018

Research article |

| 26 Sep 2018

Dual-satellite (Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8) remote sensing of supraglacial lakes in Greenland

Andrew G. Williamson, Alison F. Banwell, Ian C. Willis, and Neil S. Arnold

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Final revised paper (published on 26 Sep 2018)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 20 Apr 2018)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'Enjoyable read, with a few considerations to method and analysis', Allen Pope, 20 May 2018
RC2: 'Review of “Dual-satellite (Sentinel 2 and Landsat 8) remote sensing of supraglacial lakes in Greenland” by Williamson et al.', Samuel Doyle, 12 Jun 2018
RC3: 'Review of "Dual-satellite (Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8) remote sensing of supraglacial lakes in Greenland", by Andrew G. Williamson et al.', Kristin Poinar, 15 Jun 2018
AC1: 'Author response to reviewer comments on manuscript tc-2018-56', Andrew Williamson, 01 Aug 2018

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Andrew Williamson on behalf of the Authors (01 Aug 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (20 Aug 2018) by Bert Wouters

Dear authors,

I have read through your rebuttal and revised manuscript and am happy to inform you that in my opinion you have satisfactorily addressed the concerns of the referees. Below I have listed a number of minor comments for consideration prior to a final decision on your manuscript.

I am looking forward to your response,

Bert Wouters - TC/TCD Editor

line 103-105: Sentinel-2 data have been used for other glaciological applications as well, for example glacier flow velocity, identifying calving events, etc. Remove 'so far' and add 'and other applications' or similar at end of sentence.

line 202: 'in increments of ± 0.01 from these values' seems to be redundant since you are only using one increment positive and negative.

line 246-249: long sentence. I suggest to change to "Our empirically based approach involved deriving various lake depth-reflectance regression relationships, to determine which explained most variance in the data. We used the Landsat 8 lake depth data (dependent variable) and the Sentinel-2 TOA
reflectance data for the three optical bands (independent variables) for each pixel within the lake outlines predicted in both
sets of imagery, to determine which band and relationship produced the best match between the two datasets."

line 304: change "The physically based method (Figs. 3 and S2) applied to the red and green bands performed..." to "The physically based method applied to the red and green bands ( (Figs. 3 and S2, respectively) performed..."

Fig 3, 4 and S2: Use a darker shade of blue/red for the 1 July/31 July legend. Also, include this legend in figures S3 and S4 for consistency.

line 410: "Additional...than" sounds a bit odd. Replace by "more...than"?

line 459 and Fig. 11: "w.e." seems redundant as the (modelled) runoff is essentially liquid water

line 465: change to "these SMALL lakes" for clarity

line 589: would it be possible to calculate and include the % of rapidly draining large lakes only (i.e. only those that could be identified by MODIS)? This would provide a more fair comparison to Williamson 2017

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AR by Andrew Williamson on behalf of the Authors (03 Sep 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (07 Sep 2018) by Bert Wouters

AR by Andrew Williamson on behalf of the Authors (08 Sep 2018) Manuscript

Short summary

A new approach is presented for automatically monitoring changes to area and volume of surface lakes on the Greenland Ice Sheet using Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 satellite data. The dual-satellite record improves on previous work since it tracks changes to more lakes (including small ones), identifies more lake-drainage events, and has higher precision. The results also show that small lakes are important in ice-sheet hydrology as they route more surface run-off into the ice sheet than large lakes.