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.
