This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 2 of this Preprint.
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Abstract
Observations of glacier melt and runoff are of fundamental interest in the study of glaciers and their interactions with their environment. Considerable recent interest has developed around distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), a sensing technique which utilizes Rayleigh backscatter in fiber optic cables to measure the seismo-acoustic wavefield in high spatial and temporal resolution. Here, we present data from a month-long, 9 km DAS deployment extending through the ablation and accumulation zones on Rhonegletscher, Switzerland, during the 2020 melt season. While testing several types of machine learning (ML) models, we establish a regression problem using the DAS data as the dependent variable to predict the glacier discharge observed at a proglacial stream gauge. We also compare two models that only depend on meteorological station data. We find that the seismo-acoustic wavefield recorded by DAS can be utilized to infer proglacial discharge. Models using DAS data outperform both the models trained on meteorological data with mean absolute errors (MAE) of 0.64 m3/s, 2.25 m3/s, and 2.72 m3/s, respectively. This study demonstrates the ability of in situ glacier DAS to be used for quantifying proglacial discharge and points the way to a new approach to measuring glacier runoff.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.31223/X5TX1J
Subjects
Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Keywords
Cryoseismology, Glaciology, Surface Melt, glacier discharge
Dates
Published: 2024-02-08 07:40
Last Updated: 2024-02-08 15:40
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