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Global Land Ice Measurements from Space pp 439–463Cite as

European Alps

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Abstract

Glaciers in the Alps have been studied since the 17th century, as they were located close to human settlements and catastrophic events (e.g., outburst floods from glacier-dammed lakes) killed people and devastated arable land. With increased physical understanding of glaciers obtained during the 19th century, the first systematic measurements of glacier fluctuations were started back in 1894. Over the past decades, satellite measurements have increasingly contributed to our understanding of glaciers and their changes from a large variety of sensors, techniques and research topics. In this chapter we present how satellite data were applied in four countries of the Alps (Austria, France, Italy, and Switzerland) to learn more about glaciers and their changes. By combining remote-sensing data with field observations and numerical modeling, several important results have been obtained. The fields of research relevant to this chapter include creation of glacier inventories and analysis of glacier-specific area changes, determination of elevation changes and flow velocity, mapping of snow lines and mass balance assessment, as well as studying supraglacial lakes, the thermal properties of debris cover, and components of the surface energy balance. Regional studies and field evidence confirm that glacier area loss in the Alps has been widespread and massive over the past decades and was accompanied by major losses in glacier volume.

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Acknowledgments

The work of F. Paul is supported by a grant from the ESA project GlobGlacier (21088/07/I- EC). R. Ranzi thanks Stefan Taschner and Laura Iacovelli for their valuable help in processing some of the ASTER images and the financial support from a MURST “Monitoring of Glaciers’’ grant and another from the CARIPANDA project. ASTER data courtesy of NASA/GSFC/METI/Japan Space Systems, the U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team, and the GLIMS project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. World Glacier Monitoring Service, Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Frank Paul

  2. Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Ge´ophysique de l’Environnement, St Martin d’He` res, France, France

    Yves Arnaud

  3. Institut de Recherche pour le De´veloppement, France, France

    Yves Arnaud

  4. Department of Civil Engineering, Architecture, Land, Environment and Department of Mathematics, University of Brescia, Brescia, Italy

    Roberto Ranzi

  5. Institute of Meteorology and Geophysics, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

    Helmut Rott

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  1. Frank Paul
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Correspondence to Frank Paul .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Arizona Dept. Hydrology & Water Resources, Tucson, Arizona, USA

    Jeffrey S. Kargel

  2. Dept. Hydrology and Water Resources, Global Land Ice Measurements from Space University of Arizona, Tuscon, Arizona, USA

    Gregory J. Leonard

  3. Texas A & M University Department of Geography, College Station, Texas, USA

    Michael P. Bishop

  4. University of Oslo Dept. Geosciences, Oslo, Norway

    Andreas Kääb

  5. University of Colorado, Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, USA

    Bruce H. Raup

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Paul, F., Arnaud, Y., Ranzi, R., Rott, H. (2014). European Alps. In: Kargel, J., Leonard, G., Bishop, M., Kääb, A., Raup, B. (eds) Global Land Ice Measurements from Space. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79818-7_20

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