The Determination of the Snow Optical Grain Diameter and Snowmelt Area on the Greenland Ice Sheet Using Spaceborne Optical Observations

• Published in: Remote Sensing
• Main Authors: Vandecrux, Baptiste, Box, Jason, E, Wehrlé, Adrien, Kokhanovsky, Alexander, A, Picard, Ghislain, Niwano, Masashi, Hörhold, Maria, Faber, Anne-Katrine, Steen-Larsen, Hans, Christian
• Other Authors: Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), Université Joseph Fourier - Grenoble 1 (UJF), University of Sheffield Sheffield, Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier (UT3), Université de Toulouse (UT), Alfred-Wegener-Institut, Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung = Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research = Institut Alfred-Wegener pour la recherche polaire et marine (AWI), Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft = Helmholtz Association, Niels Bohr Institute Copenhagen (NBI), Faculty of Science Copenhagen, University of Copenhagen = Københavns Universitet (UCPH)-University of Copenhagen = Københavns Universitet (UCPH)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2022
• Subjects: [SDE]Environmental Sciences; Greenland; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: https://hal.science/hal-04389390; https://hal.science/hal-04389390/document; https://hal.science/hal-04389390/file/vandecrux_2022.pdf; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14040932

International audience The optical diameter of the surface snow grains impacts the amount of energy absorbed by the surface and therefore the onset and magnitude of surface melt. Snow grains respond to surface heating through grain metamorphism and growth. During melt, liquid water between the grains markedly increases the optical grain size, as wet snow grain clusters are optically equivalent to large grains. We present daily surface snow grain optical diameters (dopt) retrieved from the Greenland ice sheet at 1 km resolution for 2017–2019 using observations from Ocean and Land Colour Instrument (OLCI) onboard Sentinel-3A. The retrieved dopt are evaluated against 3 years of in situ measurements in Northeast Greenland. We show that higher dopt are indicative of surface melt as calculated from meteorological measurements at four PROMICE automatic weather stations. We deduce a threshold value of 0.64 mm in dopt allowing categorization of the days either as melting or nonmelting. We apply this simple melt detection technique in Northeast Greenland and compare the derived melting areas with the conventional passive microwave MEaSUREs melt flag for June 2019. The two flags show generally consistent evolution of the melt extent although we highlight areas where large grain diameters are strong indicators of melt but are missed by the MEaSUREs melt flag. While spatial resolution of the optical grain diameter-based melt flag is higher than passive microwave, it is hampered by clouds. Our retrieval remains suitable to study melt at a local to regional scales and could be in the future combined with passive microwave melt flags for increased coverage.