Systematic swath elevation and monthly DEMs over the Antarctica Ice Sheet margin from CryoSat-2

Land-ice is declining globally, raising sea levels worldwide and impacting glacial risks and access to fresh-water in high-mountain glaciers regions. Land-ice monitoring via Earth Observation methods in general, and altimetry in particular, are essential for tracking the current status of ice volume change and its evolution as climate continues to evolve and mitigating actions are being pursued.

In this context, ESA launched the CryoSat ThEMatic PrOducts (Cryo-TEMPO) activity that supports a wide variety of end-users working in the areas of sea ice, polar oceans, land ice, coasts, and hydrology. The CryoTEMPO-EOLIS (Elevation Over Land Ice from Swath) went live for Greenland in May and is now going live for Antarctica too.

The EOLIS products exploit CryoSat’s SARIn mode and the novel Swath processing technique to deliver increased spatial and temporal coverage of time-dependent elevation over land ice, a critical metric for tracking ice mass trends.

The dataset consists of systematic reprocessing of the entire CryoSat-2 archive to generate new L2-Swath products, increasing data sampling by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude compared with the operational L2 ESA product. In addition, the EOLIS dataset is joined with the ESA L2 Point-Of-Closest-Approach to generate monthly DEM products. This dataset will further the ability of the community to analyse and understand trends across the Greenland Ice Sheet margin.

May 2020 is now available for Antarctica while all monthly DEMs between 2011 and 2020 will be available in the next 2 weeks. Further data will become available on a monthly basis. In addition, all months of data are now available for Greenland and the remainder of the world’s land-ice regions will be available later in 2021.

Links:

Dataset available here: ftp://science-pds.cryosat.esa.int/

EOLIS website: https://www.cryotempo-eolis.org

Earthwave: http://www.earthwave.co.uk

University of Edinburgh: http://www.ed.ac.uk

isardSat: https://www.isardsat.space