CryoSat-2 delivers monthly and inter-annual surface elevation change for Arctic ice caps

Gray, L.; Burgess, D.; Copland, L.; Demuth, M. N.; Dunse, T.; Langley, K.; Schuler, T. V.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-9-1895-2015

Articles | Volume 9, issue 5

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-9-1895-2015

© Author(s) 2015. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-9-1895-2015

© Author(s) 2015. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 9, issue 5

Research article

|

25 Sep 2015

Research article |

| 25 Sep 2015

CryoSat-2 delivers monthly and inter-annual surface elevation change for Arctic ice caps

L. Gray, D. Burgess, L. Copland, M. N. Demuth, T. Dunse, K. Langley, and T. V. Schuler

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Final revised paper (published on 25 Sep 2015)
Preprint (discussion started on 26 May 2015)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC C1155: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #1, 09 Jul 2015
- AC C1384: 'Author response to both reviewer 1 and the review by Dr. Viet Helm', Laurence Gray, 08 Aug 2015
RC C1188: 'Review', Veit Helm, 12 Jul 2015

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Laurence Gray on behalf of the Authors (15 Aug 2015) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (03 Sep 2015) by Etienne Berthier

Dear Authors,
Thanks for the thorough revision of your paper and for taking into account the reviewer’s comments.
I have thus the pleasure to accept you manuscript for publication in The Cryosphere.

A few minor additional comments/suggestions:
Abstract. Make sure you provide the same number of decimals for all values.
P1 L24. Is the word “results” needed?
P2 L6. “In situ” or “grounded” rather than “surface”?
P2 L30. “s” for “Need”?
P2 L32. “see” not really needed before the reference.
P6 L1. “1100 m” (space missing)
P9. L8. I do not think the abbreviation “Nov.” has been defined. Rather “November”
P9. L9. “.e.g.” to “e.g.”
P12. L26. Is “underestimated” the right word here? Maybe better: “Poorly resolved” or “poorly sampled”
P14 L9. “don’t’ -> “do not”
P17 L32. Maybe this is also the right place to cite Nilsson et al.? (similar type of strong melt event are discussed in their study)
P19 L30. “Devon” --> “Devon Ice Cap” (here and at other places in the paper, same for other ice caps Penny and Agassiz in section 5.4)
P20. L6-7. Remove “,” after “al.”
P20. L8. No cap letter for ice caps in the title (I think but I am not sure)
P20. L27. I think here you should stress the remarkable consistency of the ice thinning between the two nearby Penny and Barnes Ice caps (about 2.5 m overall of thinning).
Figure 3 and 6. Please, include the limit (outline) of the Devon ice cap so that the reader gets a good sense of the proportion of the ice cap that has been sampled (and how close to the margins CS2 can “see”). As you nicely did in Figure 10 for Austfonna.

Thanks a lot for choosing The Cryosphere to publish your work,
Best regards,
Etienne Berthier

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Short summary

We show that the Cryosat (CS) radar altimeter can measure elevation change on a variety of Arctic ice caps. With the frequent coverage of Cryosat it is even possible to track summer surface height loss due to extensive melt; no other satellite altimeter has been able to do this. However, we also show that under cold conditions there is a bias between the surface and Cryosat detected elevation which varies with the conditions of the upper snow and firn layers.