SICE implementation of the Simple Cloud Detection Algorithm (SCDA) v2.0

• Main Authors: Wehrlé, Adrien, Box, Jason
• Format: Dataset
• Language: unknown
• Published: GEUS Dataverse 2021
• Subjects: Greenland; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.22008/fk2/n0xwsj; https://dataverse01.geus.dk/citation?persistentId=doi:10.22008/FK2/N0XWSJ

The Programme for Monitoring of the Greenland Ice Sheet (PROMICE) provides surface meteorological and glaciological measurements from widespread on-ice automatic weather stations since mid-2007. In this study, we use 105 PROMICE ice-ablation time series to identify the timing of seasonal bare-ice onset preceded by snow cover conditions. From this collection, we find a bare-ice albedo at ice-ablation onset (here called bare-ice-onset albedo) of 0.565 ± 0.109 that has no apparent spatial dependence among 20 sites across Greenland. We then apply this snow-to-ice albedo transition value to measure the variations in daily Greenland bare-ice area in Sentinel-3 optical satellite imagery covering the extremely low and high respective melt years of 2018 and 2019. Daily Greenland bare-ice area peaked at 153 489 km² in 2019, 1.9 times larger than in 2018 (80 220 km²), equating to 9.0% (in 2019) and 4.7% (in 2018) of the ice sheet area.