Crossover analysis and automated layer-tracking assessment of the extracted DEM of the basal topography of the canadian arctic archipelago ice-cap

In 2014, as part of the NASA Operation IceBridge project, the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets operated a multi-beam synthetic aperture radar depth sounder/imager over the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA) to generate digital elevation models (DEMs) of the glacial basal topography. In this work, we briefly describe the processing steps that led to the generation of these DEMs, algorithm improvements over previously published results, and assess the results from two different perspectives. First, we evaluate the self-consistency of the DEMs where flight paths cross over each other and two measurements are made at the same location. Secondly, we compare the quality of the outputs of the ice-bottom tracker before and after applying manual corrections to the tracker results; the tracker is an algorithm that we implemented to automatically track the ice-bottom. Even though the CAA ice-caps are mountainous areas, where the scenes often have ice and no ice regions, which makes the imaging complicated, the statistical results show good tracking performance and a good match between the overlapped DEMs, where the mean error of the crossover DEMs is 37±9 m.