GoLIVE Overview
The Global Land Ice Velocity Extraction from Landsat (GoLIVE) project was created by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) under NASA funding. GoLIVE is a processing and staging system for near-real-time global ice velocity data derived from Landsat 8 panchromatic imagery.
The system performs repeat image feature tracking using newly developed Python Correlation (PyCorr) software applied to image pairs covering all glaciers > 5km2 as well as both ice sheets. GoLIVE runs on the University of Colorado’s supercomputer and Peta Library storage system to process ~10,000 image pairs per hour. The data are provided in Network Common Data Format (NetCDF) as geolocated grids of x and y velocity components at 300 m spacing with accompanying error and quality parameters. GoLIVE NetCDF files contain multiple variables including unmasked and masked ice velocity vectors, the magnitudes of those vectors, and several data quality variables.
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Several other smaller glaciers are also visible. The thin gray steaks in the visualization are masked regions where the GoLIVE quality parameters indicated that the there was poor correlation between the image pairs used to calculate the velocity field, possibly due to clouds or blowing snow. Note that the x-y grid lines shown here are spaced ~54 km apart and that a single polar stereographic projection is used to define the grid used for all Antarctic velocities.
The two Landsat 8 images used for this and the next two visualizations shown in Figures 2 and 3 were acquired on October 28 and November 29, 2016.
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The question is: "How sensitive are these ice sheets to changes in the atmosphere and the ocean?” said Alex Gardner of JPL. “We could wait and see, or we could look to the past to help inform what is most likely to happen in the future.” Gardner has been looking closely at Antarctica, with ice velocities represented in this visualization. He is working to combine the new Landsat 8 ice-flow data with prior maps of the continent’s glacier flow in the hopes of understanding decadal changes across the entirety of the ice sheet. Almost 2,000 cubic kilometers of ice flows into the Southern Ocean from Antarctica each year.
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