The glaciers are a natural global resource and one of the principal climate change indicator at global and local scale, being influenced by temperature and snow precipitation changes. Among the parameters used for glacier monitoring, the surface velocity is a key element, since it is connected to glacier changes (mass balance, hydro balance, glaciers stability, landscape erosion).
The leading idea of this work is to continuously retrieve glaciers surface velocity using free ESA Sentinel-1 SAR imagery and benefit from the potentialities of the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform.
Starting from the prototype infrastructure developed during the first year of the doctorate, the aim of proposed project research is to develop system's back end by studying the best configuration possible so as to manage such a huge amount and variety of data; this will permit taking advantage to its fullest of the GEE's potentiality, in order to perform a possible wider application, up to global scale.
This is the first step for the creation of a new platform able to extract huge Sentinel-1 satellite data stacks automatically and continuously, and to take advantage of GEE cloud computing, along with a huge data storage capacity provided by Google's cloud services.
This work may be used for the establishment of an innovative global glacier surface velocity monitoring service.
A web platform will be developed, including a Web Processing Service that will automatically process Sentinel imagery and calculate glacier surface velocity for all the monitored areas. It is important to underline that a worldwide glacier tracking velocity service using SAR data is currently not available; it would represent a fundamental benefit for glacier monitoring, providing near real-time monitoring capabilities across the globe, without having to organize expensive, logistically challenging and potentially dangerous in-situ expeditions. The open source approach guarantees low operating costs and enables us to have a basic service available for free on a global scale.
Thus it is not certainly a case that NASA, during International NASA Space App held in Rome on April 2016, awarded the Italian ICECream Team with the Galactic Impact worldwide prize for their L.I.V.E. Glacier Project, that is based on the scientific results obtained with our algorithm.