Pléiades Glacier Observatory

The Pléiades Glacier Observatory (PGO) is an initiative by the French Space Agency (CNES) and LEGOS to facilitate access to Pléiades satellite stereo-imagery and DEMs for glaciologists. The goal is to acquire Pléiades sub-meter imagery on 10-20 glacierized targets every season at the right time of the year (i.e., generally, the end of the melt season) to generate 2 to 4 m digital elevation models (DEMs) and 0.5 m ortho-images. Data are freely available (under specific conditions) to all science users.

Repeat acquisitions are planned after five years (so after 5 campaigns in each hemisphere) to build a catalog of geodetic mass balances based on DEM differencing. The first PGO campaign took place in 2016 in the North and early 2017 in the South.  It means that the PGO will enter into revisit mode mid-2021 in the North and early-2022 in the South.

There is not publication yet presenting the PGO initiative (we work on it!). Readers are refered to the article below that showed the potential of Pléiades stereo data for glaciology.

Berthier, E., Vincent, C., Magnússon, E., Gunnlaugsson, Á. Þ., Pitte, P., Le Meur, E., Masiokas, M., Ruiz, L., Pálsson, F., Belart, J. M. C. and Wagnon, P.: Glacier topography and elevation changes derived from Pléiades sub-meter stereo images, Cryosphere, 8(6), 2275–2291, doi:10.5194/tc-8-2275-2014, 2014.

The publication page lists several articles already published using PGO data.