Studying The Glacial Melt of Mount Baker Using Remote Sensing (1999 - 2019)

With rising temperatures glaciers around the globe are beginning to melt. Melting of large glaciers should be concerning as they can raise the present sea-level which could potentially put near sea-level urban areas underwater. We must observe the rate at which glaciers are retreating. Mountain glaciers are a good resource to observe as they do give a clear visual of how fast glaciers are retreating. This project hopes to give a good visual representation and quantitative measurement of how much glacial melt is occurring at Mt Baker in Washington, United States, in the last 20 years. This project will use satellite images acquired from the end of the 1990s to the present around the end of the summer and compare those them. This project’s data will be obtained through USGS collected by a few different remote sensors, such as Landsat-5, 7, and 8. This project will likely require the use of georeferencing and classification algorithms to easily compare images and understand the glacial change as presented in the data. Classifications will be used to help identify any small, isolated ice patches that have been disconnected from the main glacier. The project is presumed to show that Mt Baker will have had significant glacial melt over the 20-year period. The project hopes to be able to determine how much glacial melt occurs on average by using 5 year intervals and compare it to statistical data from other studies