Arctic Glaciers Mass Balance from satellite gravimetry and DEM differencing

This document describes the LEGOS-Magellium mass balance dataset for Arctic glacier regions based on satellite gravimetry and DEM (Digital Elevation Model) differencing. The total mass balance is evaluated for five regions of the 6th version of the Randolph Glacier Inventory namely the Arctic Canada North, Arctic Canada South, Iceland, Svalbard, and the Russian Arctic. The total mass balance of Arctic glaciers is evaluated mainly based on satellite gravimetry measurements. An ensemble approach updated by Blazquez et al. (2018) is adopted to assess uncertainties associated with the processing and post-processing of GRACE (Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment) and GRACE-FO (GRACE-Follow On) data. A priori information from DEM differencing (Hugonnet et al., 2021) is used to reduce leakage errors associated with the mislocation of signal sources.  Total mass changes expressed in Gt are estimated from April 2002 to September 2022 for five RGI regions. The uncertainty on total mass changes is provided with a confidence interval of 95%. The dataset is provided in the GlaMBIE CSV file format.

References:

Blazquez, A., Meyssignac, B., Lemoine, J., Berthier, E., Ribes, A., & Cazenave, A. (2018). Exploring the uncertainty in GRACE estimates of the mass redistributions at the Earth surface : Implications for the global water and sea level budgets. Geophysical Journal International, 215(1), 415‑430. https://doi.org/10.1093/gji/ggy293

Hugonnet, R., McNabb, R., Berthier, E., Menounos, B., Nuth, C., Girod, L., Farinotti, D., Huss, M., Dussaillant, I., Brun, F., & Kääb, A. (2021). Accelerated global glacier mass loss in the early twenty-first century. Nature, 592(7856), Article 7856. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03436-z

The data product has been developed in collaboration between LEGOS and Magellium within the scope of the hybridizationchallenge funded by the CNES (R&T Hybrid Spatial Gravimetry 2022/2023).