Surface Melting Drives Fluctuations in Airborne Radar Penetration in West Central Greenland

Inès Otosaka*, Andrew Shepherd, Tânia G. D. Casal, Alex Coccia, Malcolm Davidson, Alessandro Di Bella, Xavier Fettweis, René Forsberg, Veit Helm, Anna E. Hogg, Sine Hvidegaard, Adriano Lemos, Karlus Macedo, Peter Kuipers Munneke, Tommaso Parrinello, Sebastian B. Simonsen, Henriette Skourup, Louise Sandberg Sørensen

*Corresponding author for this work

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    Abstract

    Greenland Ice Sheet surface melting has increased since the 1990s, affecting the rheology and scattering properties of the near‐surface firn. We combine firn cores and modelled firn densities with seven years of CryoVEx airborne Ku‐band (13.5 GHz) radar profiles to quantify the impact of melting on microwave radar penetration in West‐Central Greenland. Although annual layers are present in the Ku‐band radar profiles to depths up to 15 m below the ice sheet surface, fluctuations in summer melting strongly affect the degree of radar penetration. The extreme melting in 2012, for example, caused an abrupt 6.2 ± 2.4 m decrease in Ku‐band radar penetration. Nevertheless, retracking the radar echoes mitigates this effect, producing surface heights that agree to within 13.9 cm of coincident airborne laser measurements. We also examine two years of Ka‐band (34.5 GHz) airborne radar data and show that the degree of penetration is half that of coincident Ku‐band.
    Original languageEnglish
    Article numbere2020GL088293
    JournalGeophysical Research Letters
    Volume47
    Issue number17
    Number of pages9
    ISSN0094-8276
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2020

    Bibliographical note

    This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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