Automatic delineation of glacier grounding lines in differential interferometric synthetic-aperture radar data using deep learning.

Delineating the grounding line of marine-terminating glaciers-where ice starts to become afloat in ocean waters-is crucial for measuring and understanding ice sheet mass balance, glacier dynamics, and their contributions to sea level rise. This task has been previously done using time-consuming, mostly-manual digitizations of differential interferometric synthetic-aperture radar interferograms by human experts. This approach is no longer viable with a fast-growing set of satellite observations and the need to establish time series over entire continents with quantified uncertainties.