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Category: Project

Description: In a bid to understand the impact of climate change over time, particularly on glacial cover in the Juneau region, Alaska, this study looks at temporal analysis on satellite imagery to delineate and assess the extent of glacial retreat or advancement between 1984 and 2023 (four decades). Landsat data for the study period was obtained from USGS earth explorer with images from Landsat 5 and Landsat 8 missions. The imagery preprocessing stage involves the application of Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI) to enhance the images before image classification and vectorization. Basic and intermediate image processing techniques was utilized in mapping glacier boundaries in relation to temperature variation, allowing for a quantitative measure of changes over the selected four-decade period. Total shrinkage is measured to be 403.38 Sq. miles showing a reduction of 19.56% from 1984 to 2022. The result of this study gives an insight into the dynamics of the Juneau glacial cover in response to climate change.