ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Ocean Observation
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1476785
Study on Extracting Surface Meltwater on the Amery Ice Shelf Based on a Novel Water Index
Provisionally accepted
- Henan University of Technology, Zhengzhou, China
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To address the issue of traditional water indices misclassifying shadows as water, this study conducted a statistical analysis of the spectral characteristics of land cover types in polar regions. It was found that the reflectance curve of water exhibits the steepest decline between the red and green bands, while the reflectance curve of shadows the smoothest decrease. By calculating the rate of decline in reflectance curves between the red and green bands for meltwater and shadows, the differences between water and shadows can be amplified. Based on this, this study constructs a water index WI2023 for polar regions. To verify the index, this study selected 10 shaded Landsat 8 images of the Amery Ice Shelf and 10 higher-resolution Sentinel 2 images of the same day to extract meltwater and calculate their respective meltwater areas. The results showed that compared to commonly used water indices like NDWI, the meltwater area extracted based on WI2023 is closest to the meltwater area of Sentinel-2 data (extraction accuracy of 95.02%), and meltwater on the Amery Ice Shelf primarily distributed in low latitude and low altitude regions.
Keywords: Amery Ice Shelf1, Surface meltwater2, Landsat83, Shadow4, NDWI5
Received: 06 Aug 2024; Accepted: 09 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wang, Sun and Zhao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Zehao Sun, Henan University of Technology, Zhengzhou, China
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