Ice mass change in Greenland and Antarctica between 1993 and 2013 from satellite gravity measurements

• Published in: Journal of Geodesy
• Main Authors: Talpe, Matthieu J., Nerem, R. Steven, Forootan, Ehsan, Schmidt, Michael, Lemoine, Frank G., Enderlin, Ellyn M., Landerer, Felix W.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Springer Verlag 2017
• Subjects: Antarctic; Greenland; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/100560/; https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-017-1025-y; https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/100560/1/JGeod_Talpe_v3.pdf

We construct long-term time series of Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet mass change from satellite gravity measurements. A statistical reconstruction approach is developed based on a Principal Component Analysis to combine high-resolution spatial modes from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission with the gravity information from conventional satellite track-ing data. Uncertainties of this reconstruction are rigorously assessed; they include temporal limitations for short GRACE measurements, spatial limitations for the low-resolution conventional tracking data measurements, and limitations of the estimated statistical relationships between low and high degree potential coe�cients re ected in the PCA modes. Trends of mass variations in Greenland and Antarctica are assessed against a number of previous studies. The resulting time series for Greenland show a higher rate of mass loss than other methods before 2000, while the Antarctic ice sheet appears heavily in uenced by interannual variations.