The Barnes Ice Cap on Baffin Island, Canada has been rapidly shrinking for decades. In order to test our ability to automatically construct registered DEM mosaics, we built a complete , 10-m posting DEM of the Barnes using WorldView 1 and 2 imagery from the spring/summer of 2011, close in time to a LiDAR survey by NASA’s Operation IceBridge. Some manual quality control was performed to mask clouds.  The DEM was three-dimensionally registered to the LiDAR survey. The resulting mosaic has a 1-sigma error of 0.4 m compared to the LiDAR (which itself has an accuracy of 0.2 m). A hill shade representation of the resulting DEM mosaic at 5x vertical exaggeration  is shown below. Visible are dendritic networks of meltwater channels beneath the snow extending from the ice divide.

Thanks to the Ohio Supercomputer Center, we were able to process the entire WorldView stereo image inventory over Nepal. As before, these are being distributed through the Polar Geospatial Center. We are continuing to process data as they arrive and hope to have some pre/post event comparisons to show soon.

Google Earth image overlain with hillshade representations of the DEM’s that have been produced to date and are available at the PGC.