Greenland Ice Sheet CCI

Submitted by Dag Evensberget on Tue, 2015-04-14 17:56

Over the last decade, the Greenland Ice Sheet has shown rapid change, characterized by rapid thinning along the margins, accelerating outlet glaciers, and overall increasing mass loss. The state of the Greenland Ice Sheet is of global importance, and has consequently been included in the CCI Programme, described by several Essential Climate Variables (ECVs).

The objective of the CCI Ice Sheets project and of its follow-up project CCI+, is to maximize the impact of ESA satellite data on climate research, by analysing data from ESA Earth Observation missions such as ERS, Envisat, CryoSat, GRACE and the new Sentinel series of satellites.

This CCI+ project will produce data products of the following five ECV parameters, which are important in characterizing the Greenland Ice Sheet:

Surface Elevation Change (SEC) gridded data from radar altimetry;
Ice Velocity (IV) gridded data from synthetic aperture radar interferometry and feature tracking;
Gravimetric Mass Balance (GMB) maps and time series;
Mass-Flow rate Ice Discharge (MFID) time series of the ice sheet;

During the CCI+ project, a new, R&D parameter will be produced:

Supraglacial Lakes (SGL) in the Sermeq Kujalleq (Jakobshavn) hydrological catchment from optical data;

The production of the following ECV parameter has been momentaneously suspended:

Calving Front Location (CFL) time series of marine-terminating glaciers. Last time series available is for 2017.
Grounding Line Location (GLL) time series of marine-terminating glaciers;

The CCI ESA data will be supplemented with partner agency data from missions such as Landsat and GRACE in order to provide consistent, long term time series of these five parameters.

All data is made available to the public in a transparent format. We believe that the data sets produced are of great societal importance, particularly due to the connection between Ice Sheets changes and future global sea level changes.

Essential Climate Variables