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Help needed calculating glacier volume from DEMs on surface and bedrock topography

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11-25-2011 01:48 AM
BenRobson
Deactivated User
Hi there,
I'm working on my master thesis at the University of Bergen, Norway. I'm trying to work out the volume of the three parts of Folgefonna glacier, in Norway. I have the bedrock topography beneath the ice which was recorded using ground penetrating radar and ice radar during fieldwork last spring. I also have DEMs of the glacier surface from many years ranging from the 1930s to 2010. In addition this I have shapefiles of the glacier area.

I want to calculate the volume between these two DEMs, I've tried using the Cut Fill tool, but I don't know how to turn the results of this into a volume in cubic metres in order to assess the change in volume.

Can anyone help?

Thanks!

Ben Robson
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14 Replies
BenRobson
Deactivated User
Also, I'm not sure but a lot of my cut/fill operations seem to return exactly the same result, which must be wrong.  I know I'm asking for a lot of help but this is amongst the last bits (and the hardest so far) of my master so would be great if you can help!

Ben
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EricRice
Esri Regular Contributor
Ben,

Service pack 3 is available so it wouldn't hurt to install it.  As for output to geodatabase, you need to browse to one that you've created.  I'm not sure what is going on with Cut/Fill especially without the data.  Have you tried just subracting the bedrock dem from the glacial dem to get the difference in Z - then multiply that by the product of the cell size for x and y to get the volume of each pixel - then sum the whole raster?  Its kind of the manual way to do it.... Just a thought.

Regards,
Eric
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BenRobson
Deactivated User
Hi Erik,
I tried Service Pack 3 but still to no avail, same with outputting to a geodatabase, the output still isn't "closed." Is there no way I can update to the beta to close them? Maybe with the cut/fill error I can attach some of my data somehow so you I can show you what I mean? I will try the manual method, but it would be fantastic for my methodology if I can get one of these tools to work!

Thanks,

Ben
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BenRobson
Deactivated User
Hi,
The manual method is actually working, I got some cut/fills to work and some don't, but I think I'm happy with this. Thank you so much for all your help Erik!

God Helg/Have a good weekend,

Ben
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DavidHollema
Deactivated User
I have an idea in the arcgis ideas site for better gpr support.  Please promote and share the link.

http://ideas.arcgis.com/ideaView?id=087E00000004av0IAA
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