Perito Moreno Glacier (Argentina) flow estimation by COSMO SkyMed sequence of high-resolution SAR-X imagery

Abstract The Perito Moreno Glacier (Los Glaciares National Park, Patagonia, Argentina) ice stream has been investigated using X-band SAR amplitude images collected from February to December 2009 (excluding June) at time intervals of 8 and 16 days by the COSMO SkyMed satellites. The high spatial resolution dataset (10 × 10 km swath, 1 m per pixel) reveals many details of the glacier surface and the ice velocity fields extracted from sequential image pairs by the maximum cross-correlation method cover most of the glacier area. The efficiency of the cross-correlation method improves with high spatial resolution imagery and the co-registration error of the image pair also reduces. The glacier motion detected in the period shows variability on the time scale considered, evidencing the areas of higher dynamics under different speed regimes.