Contemporary (2016 - 2020) land cover classification across West Antarctica and the McMurdo Dry Valleys

We present here the land cover classification across West Antarctica and the McMurdo Dry Valley produced from Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) images of six proglacial regions of Antarctica at 30 m resolution, with an overall accuracy of 77.0 % for proglacial land classes. We conducted this classification using an unsupervised K-means clustering approach, which circumvented the need for training data and was highly effective at picking up key land classes, such as vegetation, water, and different sedimentary surfaces. This work is supported by the Leeds-York-Hull Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) Panorama under grant NE/S007458/1. The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic project VAN 1/2022 and the Czech Antarctic Foundation funded fieldwork that contributed to part of this work.