Map of the rate of elevation change of Mont-Blanc glaciers derived from Pléiades stereo-images

This collection contains three map of elevation changes derived form Pléiades images acquired in 2012, 2021 and 2022 over the Mont-Blanc Massif (Alps) with a horizontal grid spacing of 4 m. They were derived from stereo-pairs acquired 19 August 2012, 15 August 2021, 12 October 2022, 8 August 2022 and 5 October 2022. No data are indicated by the -9999 value.

We generated 4-m DEMs from five Pléiades stereo-pairs using the semi-global matching algorithm of the Ames Stereo Pipeline (Beyer et al., 2018) and the set of parameters defined in Deschamps-Berger et al. (2020). The DEMs were first coregistered on stable terrain, masking out glacierized areas using a glacier inventory from year 2015 (Paul et al., 2020). Spatially-coherent biases in the elevation difference maps were next corrected using a polynomial fit across-track and a spline fit in the along-track direction (Falaschi et al., 2023). 

Pléiades stereo-images were obtained thanks to DINAMIS Project, for “Dispositif Institutionnel National d’Approvisionnement Mutualisé en Imagerie Satellitaire”, a French platform that acquires and distributes very high resolution Earth satellite imagery for French and foreign institutional users under specific subscription conditions.