Product release v1.2: Systematic generation of CryoSat-2 swath elevation of land ice cover in Iceland, Svalbard, and the Canadian Arctic

Systematic swath elevation for Glacier regions globally and monthly DEMs over ice caps in Iceland and Svalbard from CryoSat-2

Land-ice is declining globally, raising sea levels worldwide, 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, is essential to track the current status of ice volume change and its evolution as climate continues to evolve and mitigating actions are being pursued.

In this context, the CryoTEMPO-EOLIS (Elevation Over Land Ice from Swath) is the first of the CryoTEMPO products to go live today.

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 CryoTEMPO EOLIS products are the operational result of research and development projects CryoTop and CryoTop-Evolution.

As part of phase two, CryoTEMPO EOLIS was generated over land ice outside of the two largest ice sheets. The July, August and September 2021 point data is now available for three land-ice regions: Iceland, Svalbard, and the Canadian Arctic. Going forwards, these point datasets will be published on a monthly basis.

CryoTEMPO EOLIS DEM difference timeseries with respect to Arctic DEM over Vatnajökull ice cap in Iceland.

In addition to the point data, monthly DEMs are being created for the Vatnajokull and Austfonna ice caps. These DEMs contain a pixel level uncertainty value, allowing the user to refine the pixels used based on the magnitude of uncertainty.

Following on from these regions, the Southern Andes, Greenland Periphery, Antarctica Periphery, Alaska and Russian Arctic point data will be going live in December with the Himalayas following in January. All back processed data will be available before the end of March.

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