Greenland bare-ice albedo from PROMICE automatic weather station measurements and Sentinel-3 satellite observations
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.34194/geusb.v47.5284Keywords:
Greenland ice sheet, albedo, ice ablation, PROMICE, Sentinel-3Abstract
The Programme for Monitoring of the Greenland Ice Sheet (PROMICE) provides surface meteorological and glaciological measurements from widespread on-ice automatic weather stations since mid-2007. In this study, we use 105 PROMICE ice-ablation time series to identify the timing of seasonal bare-ice onset preceded by snow cover conditions. From this collection, we find a bare-ice albedo at ice-ablation onset (here called bare-ice-onset albedo) of 0.565 ± 0.109 that has no apparent spatial dependence among 20 sites across Greenland. We then apply this snow-to-ice albedo transition value to measure the variations in daily Greenland bare-ice area in Sentinel-3 optical satellite imagery covering the extremely low and high respective melt years of 2018 and 2019. Daily Greenland bare-ice area peaked at 153 489 km² in 2019, 1.9 times larger than in 2018 (80 220 km²), equating to 9.0% (in 2019) and 4.7% (in 2018) of the ice sheet area.
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Copyright (c) 2021 Adrien Wehrlé, Jason E. Box, Masashi Niwano, Alexandre M. Anesio, Robert S. Fausto
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