Ice surface elevation and ice thickness at 79°N Glacier, Greenland from airborne measurements in July 2021

• Main Authors: Zeising, Ole, Helm, Veit, Gupta, Aman, Steinhage, Daniel, Humbert, Angelika
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: PANGAEA 2023
• Subjects: 79°N Glacier; 79NG-EC; HTRES; AC; Airborne laser scanning; Aircraft; Binary Object; Binary Object (File Size); File content; Greenland; Greenland ice sheet; ice thickness; Nioghalvfjerdsbraeen Glacier; Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden Glacier; P5_227_NG21_2021; P5_227_NG21_2021_2107300401; POLAR 5; Surface Elevation; Ultra-wideband radar (UWB); MCoRDS 5; UWB; glacier; Ice Sheet; Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden; The Cryosphere
• Online Access: https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.963752; https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.963752

We conducted airborne laser scanner and airborne radar measurements at the 79°N Glacier (Nioghalvfjerdsbræ) in Northeast Greenland in July 2021. Here, we provide ice surface elevation and ice thickness maps of the grounding line area based on 12 across-ice flow sections separated by 1 to 2.5 km. For ice thickness determination, we used AWI's Ultra-wideband (UWB, MCoRDS 5) airborne radar. The ice thickness was derived from the two-way travel time difference between the surface and the basal reflection, transformed to a thickness using a propagation velocity for the electromagnetic wave of 168.914 m μs⁻¹. The surface elevation and ice thickness were interpolated along flowlines of the ice and gridded to a regular grid with 25 m spacing. This dataset provides the latest ice geometry of the rapidly changing ice thickness at the grounding line of 79°N Glacier. The airborne data were acquired as part of AWI's 79NG-EC campaign with AWI's polar aircraft Polar5.