Articles | Volume 15, issue 11
https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-5115-2021
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-5115-2021
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Research article
| 
12 Nov 2021
Research article |
| 12 Nov 2021
| 12 Nov 2021
Supraglacial lake bathymetry automatically derived from ICESat-2 constraining lake depth estimates from multi-source satellite imagery
Rajashree Tri Datta
CORRESPONDING AUTHOR
Earth Systems Science Interdisciplinary Center, University of
Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA
Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of
Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA
Bert Wouters
Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, Department of Physics, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands
Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of
Technology, Delft, the Netherlands
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Devon Dunmire, Alison F. Banwell, Nander Wever, Jan T. M. Lenaerts, and Rajashree Tri Datta
The Cryosphere, 15, 2983–3005, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-2983-2021, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-2983-2021, 2021
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We developed a method to estimate the aerodynamic properties of the Greenland Ice Sheet surface using either UAV or ICESat-2 elevation data. We show that this new method is able to reproduce the important spatiotemporal variability in surface aerodynamic roughness, measured by the field observations. The new maps of surface roughness can be used in atmospheric models to improve simulations of surface turbulent heat fluxes and therefore surface energy and mass balance over rough ice worldwide.
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Short summary
The ICESat-2 laser altimeter can detect the surface and bottom of a supraglacial lake. We introduce the Watta algorithm, automatically calculating lake surface, corrected bottom, and (sub-)surface ice at high resolution adapting to signal strength. ICESat-2 depths constrain full lake depths of 46 lakes over Jakobshavn glacier using multiple sources of imagery, including very high-resolution Planet imagery, used for the first time to extract supraglacial lake depths empirically using ICESat-2.
The ICESat-2 laser altimeter can detect the surface and bottom of a supraglacial lake. We...
