A 30-year monthly 5 km gridded surface elevation time series for the Greenland Ice Sheet from multiple satellite radar altimeters

Abstract

A long-term time series of ice sheet surface elevation change (SEC) is an essential parameter to assess the impact of climate change. In this study, we used an updated plane-fitting least-squares regression strategy to generate a 30-year surface elevation time series for the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) at monthly temporal resolution and 5 × 5 km grid spatial resolution using ERS-1 (European Remote Sensing), ERS-2, Envisat, and CryoSat-2 satellite radar altimeter observations obtained between August 1991 and December 2020. The ingenious corrections for intermission bias were applied using an updated plane-fitting least-squares regression strategy. Empirical orthogonal function (EOF) reconstruction was used to supplement the sparse monthly gridded data attributable to poor observations in the early years. Validation using both airborne laser altimeter observations and the European Space Agency GrIS Climate Change Initiative (CCI) product indicated that our merged surface elevation time series is reliable. The accuracy and dispersion of errors of SECs of our results were 19.3 % and 8.9 % higher, respectively, than those of CCI SECs and even 30.9 % and 19.0 % higher, respectively, in periods from 2006–2010 to 2010–2014. Further analysis showed that our merged time series could provide detailed insight into GrIS SEC on multiple temporal (up to 30 years) and spatial scales, thereby providing an opportunity to explore potential associations between ice sheet change and climatic forcing. The merged surface elevation time series data are available at https://doi.org/10.11888/Glacio.tpdc.271658 (Zhang et al., 2021).