A New Automatic Extraction Method for Glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau under Clouds, Shadows and Snow Cover

Accurately assessing the dynamic changes of glaciers under the background of climate warming is of great significance for taking scientific countermeasures to cope with climate change. Aiming at the difficulties of glacier identification, such as mountain and cloud shadow, cloud cover and seasonal snow cover in high altitude areas, this paper proposes a reflectivity difference index for identifying glaciers in shadow and glacial lakes and a multi-temporal minimum band ratio index for reducing the influence of snow cover. It establishes a new large-scale glacier extraction method (so-called Double RF) based on the random forest algorithm of Google Earth Engine (GEE) and applies it to the Tibetan Plateau. The verification results based on 30% sample points show that overall accuracies of the first and second classification of 96.04% and 90.75%, respectively, and Kappa coefficients of 0.92 and 0.83, respectively. Compared with the real glacier dataset, the percentage of correctly extracted glacier area of the total area of glacier dataset (PGD) was 84.07%, and the percentage of correctly extracted glacier area of the total area of extracted glacier (PGE) was 89.06%: the harmonic mean (HM) of the two was 86.49%. The extraction results were superior to the commonly used glacier extraction methods: the band ratio method based on median composite image (Median_Band) (HM = 79.47%), the band ratio method based on minimum composite image (Min_Band) (HM = 81.19%), the normalized difference snow cover index method based on median composite image (Median_NDSI) (HM = 83.48%), the normalized difference snow cover index method based on minimum composite image (Min_NDSI) (HM = 84.08%), the random forest method based on median composite image (Median_RF) (HM = 83.87%) and the random forest method based on minimum composite image (Min_RF) (HM = 85.36%). The new glacier extraction method constructed in this study could significantly improve the identification accuracy of glaciers under the influences of shadow, snow cover, cloud cover and debris. This study provides technical support for obtaining long-term glacier distribution data on the Tibetan Plateau and revealing the impact of climate warming on glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau.