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Glaciers have experienced a global trend of recession within the past century. Quantification of glacier variations using satellite imagery has been of great interest due to the importance of glaciers as freshwater resources and as indicators of climate change. Spatiotemporal glacier dynamics must be monitored to quantify glacier variations. The potential methods to quantify spatiotemporal glacier dynamics with increasing complexity levels include detecting the terminus location, measuring the length of the glacier from the accumulation zone to the terminus, quantifying the glacier surface area, and measuring glacier volume. Although some deep learning methods designed purposefully for glacier boundary segmentation have achieved acceptable results, these models are often localized to the region where their training data were acquired and further rely on the training sets that were often curated manually to highlight glacial regions. Due to the very large number of glaciers, it is practically impossible to perform a worldwide study of glacier dynamics using manual methods. As a result, an automated or semi-automated method is highly desirable. The current study has built upon our previous works moving towards identification methods of the 2D glacier profile for glacier area segmentation. In this study, a deep learning method is proposed for segmentation of temporal Landsat images to quantify the glacial region within the Mount Cook/Aoraki massif located in the Southern Alps/Kā Tiritiri o te Moana of New Zealand/Aotearoa. Segmented glacial regions can be further utilized to determine the relationship of their variations due to climate change. This model has demonstrated promising performance while trained on a relatively small dataset. The permanent ice and snow class was accurately segmented at a 92% rate by the proposed model. 

Glaciers are important indictors of climate change as changes in glaciers physical features such as their area is in response to measurable evidence of fluctuating climate factors such as temperature, precipitation, and CO2. Although a general retreat of mountain glacier systems has been identified in relation to centennial trends toward warmer temperatures, there is the potential to extract a great deal more information regarding regional variations in climate from the mapping of the time history of the terminus position or surface area of the glaciers. The remote nature of glaciers renders direct measurement impractical on anything other than a local scale. Considering the sheer number of mountain glaciers around the globe, ground measurements of terminus position are only available for a small percentage of glaciers and ground measurements of glacier area are rare. In this project, changes in the terminal point and area of Franz Josef and Gorner glaciers were quantified in response to climate factors using satellite imagery taken by Landsat at regular intervals. Two supervised learning methods including a parametric method (multiple regression) and a nonparametric method (generalized additive model) were implemented to identify climate factors that impact glacier changes. Local temperature, CO2, and precipitation were identified as significant factors for predicting changes in both Franz Josef and Gorner glaciers. Spatiotemporal quantification of glacier change is an essential task to model glacier variations in response to global and local climate factors. This work provided valuable insights on quantification of surface area of glaciers using satellite imagery with potential implementation of a generic approach.