TY - JOUR
T1 - Surface Melting Drives Fluctuations in Airborne Radar Penetration in West Central Greenland
AU - Otosaka, Inès
AU - Shepherd, Andrew
AU - Casal, Tânia G. D.
AU - Coccia, Alex
AU - Davidson, Malcolm
AU - Di Bella, Alessandro
AU - Fettweis, Xavier
AU - Forsberg, René
AU - Helm, Veit
AU - Hogg, Anna E.
AU - Hvidegaard, Sine
AU - Lemos, Adriano
AU - Macedo, Karlus
AU - Kuipers Munneke, Peter
AU - Parrinello, Tommaso
AU - Simonsen, Sebastian B.
AU - Skourup, Henriette
AU - Sørensen, Louise Sandberg
N1 - 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.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
U2 - 10.1029/2020GL088293
DO - 10.1029/2020GL088293
M3 - Journal article
SN - 0094-8276
VL - 47
JO - Geophysical Research Letters
JF - Geophysical Research Letters
IS - 17
M1 - e2020GL088293
ER -