Monitoring an Alpine glacier through Ground Based SAR Interferometry: a case study

This paper reports the results of an experimental campaign carried out with a Ground Based Synthetic Aperture Radar (GB-SAR), aimed at monitoring the behaviour of an Alpine glacier. The apparatus is an Ibis-L® system, a commercial interferometric radar operating at Ku-band. It has been installed in a valley in front of the Planpincieux glacier, located on the Italian side of the Mont Blanc massif, about 3 km far from the glacier surface. The images, acquired with a temporal frequency of approximately five minutes, were processed correcting the atmospheric effect using a simple model which takes into account the variation of the atmospheric parameters with the altitude. The study enhances the importance of a satisfactory evaluation of the atmospheric behaviour to achieve an estimate of the deformation, and finally evaluates the mean velocity of the glacier in the order of 20-30 cm per day.