Abstract
Abstract. During the past few decades the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have lost ice at accelerating rates, caused by increasing surface temperature. The melting of the two big ice sheets has a big impact on global sea level rise. If the ice sheets would melt down entirely, the sea level would rise more than 60 m. Even a much smaller rise would cause dramatic damage along coastal regions. In this paper we report about a major upgrade of surface elevation changes derived from laser altimetry data, acquired by NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite mission (ICESat) and airborne laser campaigns, such as Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM) and Land, Vegetation and Ice Sensor (LVIS). For detecting changes in ice sheet elevations we have developed the Surface Elevation Reconstruction And Change detection (SERAC) method. It computes elevation changes of small surface patches by keeping the surface shape constant and considering the absolute values as surface elevations. We report about important upgrades of earlier results, for example the inclusion of local ice caps and the temporal extension from 1993 to 2014 for the Greenland Ice Sheet and for a comprehensive reconstruction of ice thickness and mass changes for the Antarctic Ice Sheets.
Highlights
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets contain more than 99 % of the freshwater ice on Earth, and they are important contributors to global sea level rise
This latest reconstruction of Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) elevation changes consists of 130,000 ice-sheet elevation change time series, spanning 19932014, derived from satellite laser altimetry data acquired by NASAs Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite mission, airborne laser observations obtained by Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM) and the Land, Vegetation and Ice Sensor (LVIS)
We describe a new methodology which provides improved capabilities of detecting and monitoring surface elevation changes over ice sheets and glaciers where elevation data are collected
Summary
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets contain more than 99 % of the freshwater ice on Earth, and they are important contributors to global sea level rise. We have developed SERAC to derive information from laser altimetry data, time series of elevation changes and their partitioning into changes caused by surface processes and ice dynamics. This partition allows direct investigation of ice dynamic processes that is much needed for improving the predictive power of ice sheet models. This latest reconstruction of GrIS elevation changes consists of 130,000 ice-sheet elevation change time series, spanning 19932014, derived from satellite laser altimetry data acquired by NASAs Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite mission, airborne laser observations obtained by Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM) and the Land, Vegetation and Ice Sensor (LVIS). This work provides a major upgrade of the results presented in our latest study
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