Two decades of spaceborne measurements of Greenland ice sheet changes, validated by airborne and in-situ data
Abstract
The ESA "Greenland_ice_sheet_cci" project are currently making past and present space measurements of Greenland ice sheet changes available for use by scientists, stakeholders and the general public. The data are part of a large set of ECV's (Essential Climate Variables) made available by the ESA Climate Initiative, as a contribution to the Global Climate Observing System. The ECV data produced for the Greenland ice sheet include detailed grids of elevation changes, yearly ice flow velocities, GRACE mass balance, as well as grounding lines and calving front locations for major outlet glaciers In the presentation the current CCI results are highlighted, including Greenland-wide elevation change results across 23 years of radar altimetry from ERS, Envisat and CryoSat, ice velocity time series major outlet glaciers and coastal regions, new Greenland-wide ice velocities from the ESA Sentinel-1 mission, together with 14 years of mass changes from GRACE. The data are validated by comparison to IceBridge and CryoVEx data, in-situ data from PROMICE and other campaigns, as well as methodology intercomparisons. The ECV data confirm a consistent overall picture of accelerating mass loss of the Greenland ice sheet, a mass loss which has more the doubled in the last decade. Current rates of changes are well above 250 GT/year, corresponding to 0.7 mm/year global sea level rise. As an example of data use, high resolution mass change products are derived from the CCI data by combination of GRACE, altimetry, and firn models. By further combination with routine S-1 derived velocity fields, it is possible to extend such time series to very high temporal resolutions as well (12 days for S-1A alone, 6 days in future).
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFM.C13C0847F
- Keywords:
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- 0726 Ice sheets;
- CRYOSPHEREDE: 0728 Ice shelves;
- CRYOSPHEREDE: 1217 Time variable gravity;
- GEODESY AND GRAVITYDE: 4207 Arctic and Antarctic oceanography;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: GENERAL