Extended Data Fig. 2: Examples of automated mapping performance for selected images with potentially complex spectral characteristics.
From: Continent-wide mapping shows increasing sensitivity of East Antarctica to meltwater ponding
(a, b) Landsat 8 image of Flask Glacier on the Antarctic Peninsula, 07/02/2016. Note how surface water is successfully differentiated from areas of rock, rock shadow, ice or cloud shadow. (c, d) Landsat 7 image of meltwater ponds on Nickerson Ice Shelf, West Antarctica on 04/01/2013. Note how water is identified equally well in Landsat 7, and there are no misclassification errors with shaded surface hollows. (e, f) Landsat 8 image of the fracture zone of Thwaites Ice Shelf, 10/01/2019. There are some minor misclassification errors in areas of crevasse shadow, but these are spatially limited and did not have had a notable influence on West Antarctic Ice Sheet area totals (Supplementary Discussion 5). (g, h) Landsat 8 image of slush immediately south of Flask Glacier, from 03/03/2016. Note how large areas of slush, in addition to surface lakes, are captured by the threshold-based method. (i, j) Landsat 8 image of McMurdo Ice Shelf, 02/01/2017. Note how some surface water features have been missed, but dirty ice has not been mistaken for surface water. Ice-sheet and ice-shelf boundaries from ref. 56. Background satellite imagery from Google Earth Engine under a Creative Commons licence CC BY 4.0.
