CaFFe: Calving Fronts and Where to Find Them

Researchers from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany have developed a new dataset, CaFFe, to improve the mapping of glacial boundaries known as calving fronts. Calving is an important natural phenomenon that contributes significantly to sea level rise and climate change modeling. The dataset consists of 681 SAR images of marine-terminating glaciers in the Arctic, Greenland, and Antarctic ice sheets taken from multiple satellites over two decades. By providing long-term calving front information using SAR imagery from multiple satellites, CaFFe introduces new challenges such as different penetration depths or sensitivity to surface changes; different signal-to-noise ratios; and different geometries, topographic effects, shading, and overlay effects.