Greenland ice-melt spread into Northwest Coast revealed by GRACE (GRACE data viser at issmeltingen på Grønland sprer seg til nordvestkysten)

Abstract

We examine the extent and magnitude of Greenland ice sheet surface melting between 2002 and 2010. We show that the well documented Greenland ice mass loss in the southern region spread to northwest Greenland in the period from 2007 to 2010. We use Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite data to estimate ice mass variability over time in Greenland. Monthly GRACE level 2 Release-04 (RL04) data from Center for Space Research (CSR) are used for the period April 2002 to December 2010. In contrast to other recent studies, our method employs a non-isotropic filter whose degree of smoothing corresponds to a Gaussian filter with a radius of 340 km. Stripping effects in the GRACE data, C20 effect, and leakage effects are taken into consideration in the computations.