Direct, in situ measurements of glacier mass balance are expensive. Remote sensing would be an attractive alternative if remotely observable quantities could be interpreted in terms of mass gain or loss. A system developed recently for the analysis of Radarsat browse images is used here to explore temporal and environmental controls of melting on glaciers on Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut, Canada. The browse images have an effective spatial resolution of 2 km, are georeferenced to single-pixel accuracy, and number about 200 over the two study years, 1998 and 1999. Surface melting in the accumulation zone is readily recognized by the contrast between bright frozen firn, which exhibits a microwave signal dominated by volume scattering from ice lenses and pipes, and dark wet firn, the signal from which is muted by either absorption or near-specular reflection at the surface. In the ablation zone, radar images, apart from showing the brief spring period of snowmelt, contain little information about the intensity or even the fact of melting. However, in the accumulation zone there is a definite dependence of brightness on temperature: at temperatures above freezing, the hotter it is the darker is the appearance of the glacier. This is most naturally (and encouragingly) interpreted as a relation between brightness and melting rate. Analysis of same-day image pairs shows that, as expected, the terrain slope and the aspect influence the radar brightness strongly and must therefore be allowed for in future modelling of the hydrology of ablation on glaciers. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley Sons.

Baby Glacier, Axel Heiberg Island, N.W.T., Canada is a small (0.6 km(2)), high-latitude (79 degrees N), high-altitude (700-1200 m) glacier with a mass balance record extending from 1959-60 to the present. The record demonstrates shrinkage of the glacier, but a statistically significant trend is not evident. Correlations are strong between the mass balance of Baby Glacier and that of the nearby and much larger White Glacier, and also those of even larger, more distant glaciers. Thus programmes of measurement on small, simple ice bodies such as Baby Glacier can be representative of a large region. However, inter-annual changes are more accentuated for Baby Glacier. Baby Glacier does not meet all of the usual criteria for a representative glacier. but it straddles the regional equilibrium zone, a fact which helps to offset the disadvantages of its small size and limited altitudinal range. The equilibrium zone deserves to be an important focus for studies of high-arctic mass balance, with the aim of facilitating future measurement programmes which will rely on satellite remote sensing.

Abstract White Glacier is a valley glacier at 79.5°N with an area of 38.7 km2. Its mass balance has been measured, over 32 years with a 3 year gap, by standard techniques using the stratigraphic system with a stake density of the order of one stake per km2. Errors in stake mass balance are about ±(200–250) mm, due largely to the local unrepresentativeness of measurements. Errors in the whole-glacier mass balance B are of the same order as single-slake errors. However, the lag-1 autocorrelation in the time series of B is effectively zero, so it consists of independent random samples, and the error in the long-term “balance normal” 〈B〉 is noticeably less. 〈B〉 is −100 ± 48 mm. The equilibrium-line altitude (ELA) averages 970 m. with a range of 470–1400 m. Mass balance is well correlated with ELA, but detailed modelling shows that the equilibrium line is undetectable on visible-band satellite images. A reduced network of a few stakes could give acceptable but less accurate estimates of the mass balance, as could estimates based on data from a weather station 120 km away. There is no evidence of a trend in the mass balance of White Glacier. To detect a climatologically plausible trend will require a ten-fold reduction of measurement error, a conclusion which may well apply to most estimates of mass balance based on similar stake densities.