Well, a nice surprise at the start of the year: Hannah Prantls paper on mapping glacier snow cover extent and snow line elevation using terrestrial laser scanner signal returns is featured on the cover of Geosciences Vol 7, No. 3. Pretty cool as I think this is Hannahs first research article 🙂

The summary text for the paper is:

We demonstrate that Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS) return signals can be used to accurately map the snow cover extent over a glacier. A rule-based classification employing intensity, surface roughness and an associated optical image, achieves classification accuracy of 68–100%. Snow cover extent is valuable information for glacier surface energy balance models, which are sensitive to the glacier surface condition, however as the TLS intensity signal shows no meaningful relationship with surface or bulk snow density, the snow mass remains elusive.

Here is the featured figure:

Evolution of the TLS and AMUNDSEN model snowlines during summer 2014 and summer 2015. The order of the raster layer is: (A) 26 June 2014, (B) 18 July 2014, (C) 1 August 2014, (D) 25 August 2014, (E) 4 September 2014, (F) 23 September 2014, (G) 4 October 2014, (H) 21 April 2015 and (I) 1 October 2015.

And by all means consider reading the whole paper:

Prantl, H., Nicholson, L., Sailer, R., Hanzer, F., Rastner, P. and Juen, I. (2017) Glacier snowline determination from terrestrial laser scanning intensity data, Geosciences, 7, 60, doi:10.3390/geosciences7030060. [pdf]