Greenland bare-ice albedo from PROMICE automatic weather station measurements and Sentinel-3 satellite observations
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 on...
Published in: | GEUS Bulletin |
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Main Authors: | , , , , |
Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
Language: | English |
Published: |
Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS)
2021
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Subjects: | |
Online Access: | https://geusbulletin.org/index.php/geusb/article/view/5284 https://doi.org/10.34194/geusb.v47.5284 |
Summary: | 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. |
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