The Baltoro Glacier is one of the largest glaciers in the Karakoram mountain range. Long-term monitoring of glacier dynamics provides key information on glacier evolution in a changing climate, which is essential for regional water resource and natural hazard management. On large glaciers, detailed field based mass balance is not feasible. Ice dynamic variations quantify changes in mass transport and possibly the influence of environmental parameters on the evolution of the glacier. Although velocity variations of Baltoro Glacier during winter and summer are linked to seasonally enhanced basal sliding, little is known about differences in timing and magnitude of (intra-)seasonal velocity variations and their determining mechanisms. We present time series of annual, seasonal, and intra-seasonal glacier surface velocities by means of intensity offset tracking applied on multi-mission Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data for a period of 25 years from 1992 to 2017. Supraglacial lakes forming on the downstream glacier surface in summer were mapped from 1991 to 2017 based on the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), calculated from multi-spectral Landsat and ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) imagery. Additionally, precipitation data of the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) and temperature data of ERA-Interim were used to derive the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Standardized Temperature Index (STI) from 1998 to 2017. Linking surface velocities to the SPI confirmed a strong correlation between heavy precipitation events in winter and the magnitude and the timing of glacier acceleration in summer. Downstream extensions of summer acceleration that have been found since 2015 may be explained by additional water draining from an increased number of supraglacial lakes through crevasses that have been formed in consequence of higher initial velocities, evoked by strong winter precipitation. The warmer melt seasons observed in the years 2015 to 2017 additionally affects the formation of a supraglacial lake, so stronger summer acceleration events in recent years may be indirectly related to global warming.

The northern Antarctic Peninsula was affected by a significant warming over the second half of the 20th century and the collapse of several ice shelves. Local climate conditions on James Ross Island on the northeastern coast can differ strongly from the main part of the Antarctic Peninsula. This paper reports the spatial and temporal variability of glacier surface velocities and the area of their outlets throughout James Ross Island, and evaluates potential relationships with atmospheric and oceanic conditions. Velocity estimates were retrieved from intensity feature tracking of scenes from satellite synthetic aperture radar sensors TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X between 2014 and 2018, which were validated against ground observations. Calving front positions back to 1945 were used to calculate outlet area changes for the glaciers by using a common-box approach. The annual recession rates of almost all investigated glacier calving fronts decelerated for the time periods 2009–2014 and 2014–2018 in comparison to the period 1988–2009, but their velocity patterns differed. Analysis of atmospheric conditions failed to explain the different patterns in velocity and area changes. We suggest a strong influence from local bathymetric conditions. Future investigations of the oceanic conditions would be necessary for a profound understanding of the super-position of different influencing factors.

Climate induced glacier change has important implications for global sea level rise, freshwater availability and geomorphologic hazards. Changes in ice dynamics and mass flow can globally be observed by long- and short-term changes in ice surface velocity. Consistent and continuous data on glacier surface velocity are important inputs to time series analyses, numerical ice dynamic modelling and glacier mass balance calculations. Therefore, glacier surface velocities have been identified as an Essential Climate Variable (ECV) that should be monitored on a regular and global scale. Since 2014, repeat-pass Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data, acquired by the Sentinel-1 constellation as part of ESA’s (European Space Agency) Copernicus program, enable global, near real time-like and fully automatic processing of glacier velocity fields at up to 6-day temporal resolution, independent of weather conditions, season and daylight.We present a new near-global data set of Sentinel-1 glacier velocities that comprises continuously updated image pair velocity fields, as well as monthly and annually averaged velocity mosaics at 200 m spatial resolution, derived from applying intensity feature tracking on both archived and new acquisitions. The data set covers all major glaciated regions outside the polar ice sheets and is generated in an HPC (High Performance Computing) environment at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. By the beginning of January 2021, we processed more than 110.000 Sentinel-1 scenes, amounting to roughly 450 TB of data. The velocity products are freely accessible via an interactive web portal (http://retreat.geographie.uni-erlangen.de) that provides capabilities for download and simple online analyses. We give information on the procedures of data generation, as well as on how to access the data and demonstrate the capabilities of our products for velocity time series analyses at very high temporal resolution. We compare our data to velocity products generated from very high resolution TerraSAR-X SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) and Landsat-8 optical (ITS_LIVE, GoLIVE) data. For this comparison we selected Svalbard as an example region, as it includes glaciers of a broad variety of sizes, different velocitiy magnitudes and seasonal velocity patterns, as well as very fast flowing surging glaciers and almost featureless ice caps.

Consistent and continuous data on glacier surface velocity are important inputs to time series analyses, numerical ice dynamic modelling and glacier mass flux computations. Since 2014, repeat-pass Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data is acquired by the Sentinel-1 satellite constellation as part of ESA’s (European Space Agency) Copernicus program. It enables global, near real time-like and fully automatic processing of glacier surface velocity fields at up to 6-day temporal resolution, independent of weather conditions, season and daylight. We present a new near global data set of glacier surface velocities that comprises continuously updated scene-pair velocity fields, as well as monthly and annually averaged velocity mosaics at 200 m spatial resolution. The velocity information is derived from archived and new Sentinel-1 SAR acquisitions by applying feature and speckle tracking. The data set covers 12 major glaciated regions outside the polar ice sheets and is generated in an HPC (High Performance Computing) environment at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. The velocity products are freely accessible via an interactive web portal that provides capabilities for download and simple online analyses: http://retreat.geographie.uni-erlangen.de. In this paper we give information on the data processing and how to access the data. For the example region of Svalbard, we demonstrate the potential of our products for velocity time series analyses at very high temporal resolution and assess the quality of our velocity products by comparing them to those generated from very high resolution TerraSAR-X SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) and Landsat-8 optical (ITS_LIVE, GoLIVE) data. We find that Landsat-8 and Sentinel-1 annual velocity mosaics are in an overall good agreement, but speckle tracking on Sentinel-1 6-day repeat acquisitions derives more reliable velocity measurements over featureless and slow moving areas than the optical data. Additionally, uncertainties of 12-day repeat Sentinel-1 mid-glacier scene-pair velocities are less than half (< 0.08 m d⁻¹) of the uncertainties derived for 16-day repeat Landsat-8 data (0.17–0.18 m d⁻¹).