Mass balance of Icelandic ice caps from CryoSat swath mode altimetry

Abstract:

Satellite altimetry has been traditionally used in the past to infer elevation of land ice, quantify changes in ice topography and infer mass balance over large and remote areas such as the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Radar Altimetry (RA) is particularly well suited to this task due to its all-weather year-round capability for observing the ice surface. However, monitoring of ice caps has proven more challenging. The large footprint of a conventional radar altimeter and relatively coarse ground track coverage are less suited to monitoring comparatively small regions with complex topography, so that mass balance estimates from RA rely on extrapolation methods to regionalize elevation change.
Since 2010, the Synthetic Interferometric Radar Altimeter (SIRAL) on board the ESA radar altimetry CryoSat mission has collected ice elevation measurements over ice caps. Ground track interspacing (~4km at 60°) is one order of magnitude smaller than ERS/ENVISAT missions and half of ICESAT’s, providing dense spatial coverage. Additionally the Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometric (SARIn) mode of CryoSat provides a reduced footprint and the ability to locate accurately the position of the surface reflection. Conventional altimetry provides the elevation of the Point Of Closest Approach (POCA) within each waveform, every 250 m along the flight path. Time evolution of POCA elevation is then used to investigate ice elevation change.
Here, we present an assessment of the geodetic mass balance of Icelandic ice caps using a novel processing approach, swath altimetry, applied to CryoSat SARIn mode data. In swath mode altimetry, elevation beyond the POCA is extracted from the waveform when coherent echoes are present providing between one and two orders of magnitude more elevations when compared to POCA. We generate maps of ice elevation change that are then used to compute geodetic mass balance for the period 2010 to 2015. We compare our results to estimates generated using only POCA as well as to validation datasets, and we discuss the impact of swath mode altimetry on the spatial resolution and precision of the resulting elevation change and mass balance estimates.