Abstract
The surface mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet critically depends on the intensity of ice melt/snowmelt in its ablation zone, but in situ data have been too limited to quantify the error of regional climate models. Here we use 23 years of NASA satellite and airborne laser altimetry from the Airborne Topographic Mapper; Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor; and Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite to generate time series of elevation change to compare with surface mass balance products from the Regional Atmospheric Climate Model and from the Modèle Atmosphérique Régional. For 1994–2016, the results agree at the 15–26% level, with the largest discrepancy in North Greenland. During the cold summer of 2015, the root-mean-square discrepancy is 40% in the north, 30% in the southwest, and 18–25% at low elevation. The difference drops to 23% in the southwest and 14% at low elevation during the 2016 warm summer.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 8324-8333 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Geophysical Research Letters |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue number | 16 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 28 Aug 2018 |
Funding
This work was performed at UC Irvine and JPL-Caltech funded by grants from the NASA IceBridge Research and Cryosphere programs, contracts JPL-1390432, UTA12-000609, and UTA13-000917. Data used here are available on our website (https://www.ess.uci.edu/∼velicogna/ data.html) and will be archived at NSIDC. Computations were performed on the UC Irvine Greenplanet High Performance Computing Cluster. We thank the NASA Operation IceBridge flight, instrument, and science teams for collecting and producing the science data, the Editor and anonymous reviewers for their comments, and Jeremie Mouginot (UC Irvine) for his advice on the laser altimetry analysis.
Keywords
- altimetry
- Greenland
- ice sheet
- Operation IceBridge
- snowmelt
- surface mass balance
