Correction of Correlation Errors in Greenland Ice Mass Variations from GRACE using Empirical Orthogonal Function

Abstract:

Since its launch in March 2002, the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) has provided monthly geopotential fields represented by Stokes coefficients of spherical harmonics (SH). Nominally, GRACE gravity solutions exclude effects from tides, ocean dynamics and barometric pressure by incorporating geophysical models for them. However, those models are imperfect, and thus GRACE solutions include the residual gravity effects. Particularly, unmodeled gravity variations of sub-monthly or shorter time scale cause aliasing error, which produces peculiar longitudinal stripes. Those north-south patterns are removed by spatial filtering, but caution is necessary for the aliasing correction because signals with longitudinal patterns are possibly removed during the procedure. This would be particularly problematic for studies associated with Greenland ice mass balance since large ice mass variations are expected in the West and South-West coast of Greenland that are elongated along the longitudinal direction. In this study, we develop a novel method to remove the correlation error using extended Empirical Orthogonal Function (extended EOF). The extended EOF is useful to separate spatially and temporally coherent signal from high frequency variations. Since temporal variability of the correlation error is high, the error is possibly removed via the extended EOF. Ice mass variations reduced by the extended EOF show more detail patterns of ice mass loss/gain than those from the conventional spatial filtering. Large amount of ice loss has occurred along the West, South-West and East coastal area during summer. The extended EOF is potentially useful to enhance signal to noise ratio and increase spatial resolution of GRACE data.