Gridded rates of ice-mass change in north-east Greenland from a combination of satellite gravimetry and satellite altimetry

The gridded data set comprises rates of ice-mass change in north-east Greenland for the time period July 2010 to June 2017. For this, we combined satellite altimetry data from CryoSat-2 with satellite gravimetry data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) over the Greenland Ice Sheet including peripheral glaciers and ice caps.
The combination improves ice-mass change estimates since the two satellite techniques complement each other. Satellite altimetry is used to resolve mass changes at glacier scale (grid resolution of 1.5×1.5 km²). Satellite gravimetry is directly sensitive to mass redistributions allowing the combined mass balance to be adjusted to the GRACE estimate. However, the mass-balance estimation by satellite gravimetry depends directly on the glacial-isostatic adjustment (GIA) correction. To investigate the GIA mass effect, three different GIA models were consistently used in all processing steps. Therefore, three different versions of the mass-change rates are provided depending on the GIA model applied.