Multi-sensor imaging of winter buried lakes in the Greenland Ice Sheet

Abstract

Recent studies have highlighted that meltwater in supraglacial lakes (SLs) can be buried during frozen season in the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS). Meltwater in buried lakes (BLs) can even persist through the winter, disturbing the englacial thermal regime and providing an important buffer against GrIS's contribution to sea-level rise. However, little is known about the inter-annual BL dynamics in the GrIS, and there is no quantitative statistic about the overall buried percentage. Here, we conduct a satellite-based study to automatically map the winter BLs over the GrIS during 2017–2022 using multi-source optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. To eliminate the interferences from other weak microwave reflecting surfaces, summer SLs are first extracted from Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 images to determine the potential BL searching areas on winter Sentinel-1 images. A self-adaptive thresholding algorithm is proposed to extract BLs within the dilated summer SLs using histogram-based morphological edge detectors. BLs extracted by the proposed method and visual interpretation show a substantial agreement with a precision of 0.82 and a Kappa coefficient of 0.70. On average, a total buried lake area of 182.27 km2 was observed each winter during the period 2017–2022. BLs were mainly distributed in the Center-West, South-West and North-East Basins, with the majority occurring at elevations between 800 and 1700 m. In 2019–2020, a sudden extension of BLs was observed over the GrIS, especially in the North-East Basin where abnormally high temperatures and surface runoff were recorded. In 2021–2022, a widespread distribution of BLs in the South-West Basin was observed after abnormal snowfall. Overall, about 13% of the GrIS summer SLs can persist through winter, suggesting the potential for meltwater hydrofracture in winter over large areas.