Application of a two-step approach for mapping ice thickness to various glacier types on Svalbard ...
The basal topography is largely unknown beneath most glaciers and ice caps, and many attempts have been made to estimate a thickness field from other more accessible information at the surface. Here, we present a two-step reconstruction approach for ice thickness that solves mass conservation over s...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Copernicus Publications
2017
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.17863/cam.13420 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/267464 |
| Summary: | The basal topography is largely unknown beneath most glaciers and ice caps, and many attempts have been made to estimate a thickness field from other more accessible information at the surface. Here, we present a two-step reconstruction approach for ice thickness that solves mass conservation over single or several connected drainage basins. The approach is applied to a variety of test geometries with abundant thickness measurements including marine- and land-terminating glaciers as well as a 2400-km2 ice cap on Svalbard. The input requirements are kept to a minimum for the first step. In this step, a geometrically controlled, non-local flux solution is converted into thickness values relying on the shallow ice approximation (SIA). In a second step, the thickness field is updated along fast-flowing glacier trunks on the basis of velocity observations. Both steps account for available thickness measurements. Each thickness field is presented together with an error-estimate map based on a formal propagation of ... |
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