Preprints
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-858
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-858
11 May 2023
 | 11 May 2023

Mapping the extent of giant Antarctic icebergs with Deep Learning

Anne Braakmann-Folgmann, Andrew Shepherd, David Hogg, and Ella Redmond

Abstract. Icebergs release cold, fresh meltwater and terrigenous nutrients as they drift and melt, influencing the local ocean properties and encouraging sea ice formation and biological production. To locate and quantify the fresh water flux from Antarctic icebergs, changes in their area and thickness have to be monitored along their trajectories. While the locations of large icebergs are tracked operationally by manual inspection, delineation of their extent is not. Here, we propose a U-net approach to automatically map the extent of giant icebergs in Sentinel-1 imagery. This greatly improves the efficiency compared to manual delineations, reducing the time for each outline from several minutes to less than 0.01 sec. We evaluate the performance of our U-net and two state-of-the-art segmentation algorithms on 191 images. For icebergs, larger than covered by the training data, we find that U-net tends to miss parts. Otherwise, U-net is more robust to scenes with complex backgrounds, ignoring sea ice, smaller patches of nearby coast or other icebergs and outperforms the other two techniques achieving an F1 score of 0.84 and an absolute median deviation in iceberg area of 4.1 %.

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Journal article(s) based on this preprint

09 Nov 2023
Mapping the extent of giant Antarctic icebergs with deep learning
Anne Braakmann-Folgmann, Andrew Shepherd, David Hogg, and Ella Redmond
The Cryosphere, 17, 4675–4690, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-17-4675-2023,https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-17-4675-2023, 2023
Short summary
Anne Braakmann-Folgmann, Andrew Shepherd, David Hogg, and Ella Redmond

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

Comment types: AC – author | RC – referee | CC – community | EC – editor | CEC – chief editor | : Report abuse
  • RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2023-858', Andreas Stokholm, 13 Jun 2023
    • AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Anne Braakmann-Folgmann, 07 Aug 2023
  • RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2023-858', Connor Shiggins, 14 Jun 2023
    • AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Anne Braakmann-Folgmann, 07 Aug 2023

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

Comment types: AC – author | RC – referee | CC – community | EC – editor | CEC – chief editor | : Report abuse
  • RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2023-858', Andreas Stokholm, 13 Jun 2023
    • AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Anne Braakmann-Folgmann, 07 Aug 2023
  • RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2023-858', Connor Shiggins, 14 Jun 2023
    • AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Anne Braakmann-Folgmann, 07 Aug 2023

Peer review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision | EF: Editorial file upload
ED: Publish subject to revisions (further review by editor and referees) (28 Aug 2023) by Ginny Catania
AR by Anne Braakmann-Folgmann on behalf of the Authors (29 Aug 2023)  Author's response   Author's tracked changes   Manuscript 
ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (31 Aug 2023) by Ginny Catania
AR by Anne Braakmann-Folgmann on behalf of the Authors (07 Sep 2023)  Author's response   Author's tracked changes   Manuscript 
ED: Publish as is (19 Sep 2023) by Ginny Catania
AR by Anne Braakmann-Folgmann on behalf of the Authors (28 Sep 2023)

Journal article(s) based on this preprint

09 Nov 2023
Mapping the extent of giant Antarctic icebergs with deep learning
Anne Braakmann-Folgmann, Andrew Shepherd, David Hogg, and Ella Redmond
The Cryosphere, 17, 4675–4690, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-17-4675-2023,https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-17-4675-2023, 2023
Short summary
Anne Braakmann-Folgmann, Andrew Shepherd, David Hogg, and Ella Redmond

Video supplement

Segmentation maps of giant Antarctic icebergs Anne Braakmann-Folgmann https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7875599

Anne Braakmann-Folgmann, Andrew Shepherd, David Hogg, and Ella Redmond

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Short summary
In this study, we propose a deep neural network to map the extent of giant Antarctic icebergs in Sentinel-1 images automatically. While each manual delineation requires several minutes, our U-net takes less than 0.01 sec. In terms of accuracy, we find that U-net outperforms two standard segmentation techniques in most metrics and is more robust to challenging scenes including sea ice, coast and other icebergs. The absolute median deviation in iceberg area across 191 images is 4.1 %.