Accelerating ice loss from peripheral glaciers in North Greenland ...

• Main Authors: Khan, Shfaqat Abbas, Colgan, William, Neumann, Thomas A., Van Den Broeke, Michiel R., Brunt, Kelly M., Noël, Brice, Bamber, Jonathan L., Hassan, Javed, Bjørk, Anders A.
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2022
• Subjects: FOS Earth and related environmental sciences; Greenland; Ice Sheet; North Greenland
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.zpc866tb8; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.zpc866tb8

In recent decades, Greenland’s peripheral glaciers have experienced large-scale mass loss, resulting in a substantial contribution to sea-level rise. Only 4% of Greenland’s ice cover are small peripheral glaciers that are distinct from the ice sheet proper. Despite comprising this relatively small area, these small peripheral glaciers are responsible for 11% of the ice loss associated with Greenland’s recent sea-level rise contribution. Using the satellite laser platforms ICESat and ICESat-2, we estimate that ice loss from these Greenland glaciers increased from 27±6 Gt/yr (2003–2009) to 42±6 Gt/yr (2018–2021). Here, we provide the laser altimetry assessment of changing ice loss rates from Greenland peripheral glaciers that bridges both the ICESat and ICESat-2 periods of Feb 2003 – Dec 2021. We provide peripheral glaciers elevation changes including correction for firn compaction, elastic uplift rates from present-day mass changes, and long-term past ice changes (Glacial Isostatic Adjustment- GIA). We ... : We use ICESat data from February 2003 to October 2009 to estimate elevation changes over the ice surface. We estimate height changes over the ice surface, on a regular grid with a resolution of 500x500 m that covers all of Greenland’s peripheral glaciers. We use all available ICESat data to create height time series at each grid point. At each grid point, we fit a trend, a second-order surface topography, and a seasonal term to account for the annual surface changes. The observed height change rates from ICESat are interpolated into a regular grid of 500x500 m. The interpolation is performed using the ordinary kriging method. We used the observed elevation change rates to estimate an empirical semi-variogram. Next, we fit an exponential model variogram (with a range of 60 km) to the empirical semi-variogram to take the spatial correlation of elevation change rates into account in the error budget. For each grid point, we estimate elevation change rate dh and associated error. We correct the observed height ...