Twelve years of meltwater on Petermann and C.H. Ostenfeld glaciers

My master’s thesis at Stockholm University maps twelve years of slush and supraglacial lakes on the Petermann and C.H. Ostenfeld glaciers in northern Greenland.

What it does

Working in Google Earth Engine, I classify slush and ponded meltwater from Landsat 8 and 9 imagery using a Random Forest classifier adapted from Dell et al. (2022), and estimate lake volumes following Pope et al. (2016) and Moussavi et al. (2020). Custom slope- and cloud-shadow masks let me track surface water at roughly two-day intervals, fine enough to detect rapid lake drainage events as they happen. The result is a high-frequency, long-term record of meltwater area, elevation, volume, and drainage for both glaciers.

The thesis is supervised by Dr. Nina Kirchner and Dr. Abhay Prakash.

📄 Read the full thesis (PDF)

Code and tools

All of the analysis code is open on GitHub:

• MSc_ThesisScripts — the Earth Engine and Python workflows used throughout the thesis.
• A public drainage-event viewer in the repo renders before-and-after Landsat composites of individual drainage events (running it requires a Google Earth Engine account).

Built with Google Earth Engine, Landsat 8/9, Python, and JavaScript.