Recalculated mass balance record for Midre Lovénbreen, Svalbard

Glacier mass balance has been measured since 1968 on Midre Lovénbreen, Svalbard, one of the longest high Arctic records. Available data includes areally-averaged winter, summer, and net balances. Balances by elevation, however, were not consistently reported. Here we derive a time-series of the balances as a function of elevation using original stake data from archived field notebooks and maps, graphs of balance as a function of elevation taken from old reports. We recalculate areally-averaged balances using a different fits to the data, rather than hand-drawn curves from earlier years, and adjust for changes in hypsometry. There is good agreement between in situ mass balance and geodetic changes obtained by differencing digital elevation models (DEMs) from different dates (1936, 1962, 1969, 1977, 1995, 2003, 2005). The main long-term trends over the length of the 44-yr record are that winter and net balance are decreasing overall, and that summer and net balance elevational gradients increase, the result of increasing ice loss at lower elevations.