GlacierCastAI: Predicting Glacier Retreat from Multi-Modal Satellite Imagery and Climate Signals
About
ERA5 seasonal climate variables contain predictive information about future glacier retreat beyond what satellite imagery alone provides, yet existing deep learning methods focus on mapping current boundaries rather than forecasting future ones. This paper presents GlacierCastAI, which reframes glacier boundary prediction as a multi-modal spatiotemporal forecasting problem, fusing multi-temporal Landsat imagery with ERA5 reanalysis climate variables and Copernicus DEM terrain features to forecast glacier boundaries across five glaciers spanning four climate regimes. The architecture couples a ResNet50 spatial encoder with a ConvLSTM temporal model and a cross-attention climate fusion module. Because forecasting is inherently more uncertain than mapping current boundaries, the reported IoU values (0.320-0.337) are not directly comparable to state-of-the-art mapping models. Comparisons are against traditional baselines and experimental conditions. Through a pre-registered ablation study, adding ERA5 climate signals improves image-only IoU from 0.326 to 0.337 (+3.4%), suggesting that atmospheric forcing carries predictive information beyond imagery alone. All deep learning models substantially outperform persistence and linear trend baselines (IoU 0.160 and 0.169 respectively), with improvements of 89-99% relative IoU. A lightweight climate-only MLP baseline (661K parameters) achieves an IoU of 0.320 (98% of image-only performance) using 85x fewer parameters, suggesting that ERA5 variables encode substantial predictive signal independently of satellite imagery. SHAP attribution analysis suggests that spring solar radiation (MAM) is the dominant climate driver, consistent with the known role of spring insolation in setting melt season trajectories.