## 1 Introduction
### Remote Sensing Data for King George Island  
In the area covered by ASPA-128, it is difficult to conduct scientific research due to numerous obstacles, mainly cliffs and ice crevasses. The glacial systems are not extensive, the main glaciers flow from the Warszawa icefield toward the sea but, additionally, smaller glaciers are cut off from the supply from the icefield above. The features of this system make the glaciers very sensitive to climatic changes, but, because of their size, the ranges of ice must be determined precisely. This requires the use of an appropriate method of mapping and testing at the right time when the winter snow cover will already melt and when fresh snow will not yet cover the terrain in a way that prevents testing. The best period for fieldwork is February-April. However, it varies between years. For the above reasons, the most effective method for field research is the use of high-resolution aerial or satellite images. Based on the authors' experience, in this work, the images with a spatial accuracy higher than 10 m were considered, however, less precise data were tested as well. The most important sources of remote sensing data taken into account in this work are discussed below. 1. **Satellite observation systems**: Landsat is the pioneering remote sensing satellite program which has provided continuous multispectral data of the Earth's land surfaces since 1972. With the launch of the L3 sensor in 1978, the possibility of acquiring images at a resolution of 30 m appeared. The next milestone was obtaining multispectral images from the TM (L4) sensor released in 1982. Since then, Landsat satellites have been recording the Earth's surface with a revisit time of 16 days. In 1993, a sixth generation of satellites equipped with an ETM sensor was launched. This sensor enabled the acquisition of panchromatic photos at a resolution of 15 m, which greatly improved the possibilities of ice separation from the ground and the same detection of the range of small glaciers. Landsat 8 is the last observation LANDSAT satellite launched on 11 February 2013. It also has the ability to acquire panchromatic photos in 15 m resolution (OLI: Operational Land Imager sensor), but compared to the ETM sensor, the spectral resolution has been limited from 0.52-0.90 to 0.500-0.68 (\(\upmu\)m), which means that the sensor is not sensitive to near infrared. This results in lower sensitivity to water detection, which in the case of research, is of great importance. For 2020, the next satellite is tentatively scheduled for launch by the NASA/USGS operator. Landsat-9 will be equipped with near-identical copies of the OLI and TIRS (Thermal Infrared Sensor) instruments that were flown on Landsat-8. Landsat databases are public, which is a very important fact for scientists, allowing their use in non-commercial and low-budget projects [20]. * The second public land observation system that provides archived data with high spatial resolution is The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER). It provides satellite images since February 2000. The images consist of 14 channels, including 4 with a spectral resolution of 15 m (green/yellow; red; NIR1; NIR2). Archival data can be downloaded with a free registered account from either NASA's Earth Data Search delivery system [21] or from the USGS Earth Explorer [22]. * Copernicus is actually one of the most ambitious Earth observation programmes headed by the European Commission (EC) in partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA). One of the most important part of this programme is developing a new family of missions called Sentinels. Each one will provide accurate, timely, and easily accessible information to improve the management of the environment and understand and mitigate the effects of climate change. The first launched Copernicus satellite was Sentinel-1A, equipped with a C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR).