Animation of time-dependent velocity magnitudes for Sermeq Kujalleq (Jakobshavn Isbræ) from 2009 - 2019.

• Main Author: Riel, Bryan
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: NSF Arctic Data Center 2020
• Subjects: remote sensing; glaciology; glacier dynamics; Greenland; Jakobshavn Isbræ; Kujalleq; glacier; Jakobshavn; Jakobshavn isbræ; Sermeq Kujalleq
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.18739/a2w66990b; https://arcticdata.io/catalog/view/doi:10.18739/A2W66990B

This movie is an animation of reconstructed time-dependent flow speeds for Jakobshavn Isbrae. Flow speeds contain both short- and long-term variations. The colored circle in the bottom left indicates year and time-of-year of current frame where red and blue colors correspond to summer and winter months, respectively. The inset shows the location of Jakobshavn within Greenland. The movie is a supporting asset for the manuscript (abstract following): B. V. Riel, B. M. Minchew, and I. Joughin. Observing traveling waves in glaciers with remote sensing: New flexible time-series methods and application to Sermeq Kujalleq (Jakobshavn Isbræ), Greenland. submitted to The Cryosphere, 2020. The recent influx of remote sensing data provides new opportunities for quantifying spatiotemporal variations in glacier surface velocity and elevation fields. Here, we introduce a flexible time series reconstruction and decomposition technique for forming continuous, time-dependent surface velocity and elevation fields from discontinuous data and partitioning these time series into short- and long-term variations. The time series reconstruction consists of a sparsity-regularized least squares regression for modeling time series as a linear combination of generic basis functions of multiple temporal scales, allowing us to capture complex variations in the data using simple functions. We apply this method to the multitemporal evolution of Sermeq Kujalleq (Jakobshavn Isbræ), Greenland. Using 555 ice velocity maps generated by the Greenland Ice Mapping Project and covering the period 2009 -- 2019, we show that the amplification in seasonal velocity variations in 2012 -- 2016 was coincident with a longer-term speedup initiating in 2012. Similarly, the reduction in post-2017 seasonal velocity variations was coincident with a longer-term slowdown initiating around 2017. To understand how these perturbations propagate through the glacier, we introduce an approach for quantifying the spatially varying and frequency-dependent phase velocities and attenuation length scales of the resulting traveling waves. We hypothesize that these traveling waves are predominantly kinematic waves based on their long periods, coincident changes in surface velocity and elevation, and connection with variations in the terminus position. This ability to quantify wave propagation enables an entirely new framework for studying glacier dynamics using remote sensing data.