From a glaciologist’s perspective, there are many other details to analyze from
the results. One such consideration are the snow grain diameter changes. During
melt, the diameter of a snow grain increases due to larger water content. But once
it stops melting, the grain does not shrink to its original form. Rather, the topmost
layer of melted snow is broken down over time by wind. But this process does
not happen instantly, thus the grain diameters stay elevated for some time, even
though no melting is occurring. Since the optical remote sensing technique works
by measuring the size of snow grains, this process creates natural data quality issues
because some labels do not correctly represent the situation on the ice sheet. We
hope to find a way to test and eliminate this issue in the future.
From a glaciologist’s perspective, there are many other details to analyze from the results. One such consideration are the snow grain diameter changes. During melt, the diameter of a snow grain increases due to larger water content. But once it stops melting, the grain does not shrink to its original form. Rather, the topmost layer of melted snow is broken down over time by wind. But this process does not happen instantly, thus the grain diameters stay elevated for some time, even though no melting is occurring. Since the optical remote sensing technique works by measuring the size of snow grains, this process creates natural data quality issues because some labels do not correctly represent the situation on the ice sheet. We hope to find a way to test and eliminate this issue in the future.