Snow Volume Change from Radar Layer Tracking

Climate change disproportionately impacts polar regions, with melting ice-sheets contributing to Sea-Level Rise. To better understand the impact it has on our way of living, we studied the stratigraphic layers of the Greenland Ice Sheet utilizing NASA's Operation IceBridge Mission snow radar data. These radar layers represent annual snow accumulation extending back hundreds of years. Long-term snow accumulation measurements improve climate model estimates of future SLR. This project employs the CReSIS Toolbox to trace annual layers of snow accumulation across the Greenland ice sheet and derive snow volume change over time. Developed with MatLab, the toolbox allowed the filtering and adjusting of the echogram for semi-automated tracing of the snow layers. Different flight dates from 2012 to 2017 have been traced, and feedback of the toolbox has been provided to CReSIS developers.