New research, utilizing data from ESA’s Copernicus Sentinel-1 and CryoSat satellite missions, offers a stark view of the state of Antarctica’s ice shelves. Over the last 25 years, 40% of these vital floating extensions of the continent’s ice sheet have significantly diminished in volume, releasing approximately 67 trillion tonnes of meltwater into the ocean. This …
Snow cover is an important component of the Earth’s cryosphere and plays a significant role in regulating the Earth’s climate and hydrological cycle. Accurate estimates of snow cover are essential for a range of applications, from climate modelling to water resource management. In a recently published study, researchers develop an adaptive method for estimating snow-covered …
A recently published study has produced the first ever global assessment of glacier mass loss using satellite radar altimetry, in particular ESA’s CryoSat-2 satellite and a breakthrough way of using its data. The results show that between 2010 and 2020, glaciers lost a total of 272 ± 11 gigatonnes of ice, which is equivalent to …
Ice losses from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been accelerating since the 1990s, according to the latest study published today by the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE). The study, which presents a 29-year record of ice sheet mass balance from 1992 to 2020, combines 50 independent estimates of ice sheet mass …
The Glacier Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise (GlaMBIE) project is a community effort aiming for a reconciled assessment of regional and global glacier mass changes towards the next IPCC report. Anyone performing research in this domain is now invited to submit their data (either based on altimetry, DEM, in-situ glaciological, gravimetry or combined measurements) as input …
Background The ESA Polar Science Cluster involves a set of different ESA-funded scientific activities addressing different aspects of Polar research. Through this set of projects ESA aims at working hand by hand with the scientific community to: Improve our observation capacity over the polar regions and develop of the next generation of polar observations from …
The European Space Agency (ESA) organised an Earth Observation (EO) training course in collaboration with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The course took place from 19 – 23 September 2022 at the premises of the Andoya Space Centre (ASC) in Andenes, Norway. The training was designed to promote and disseminate EO data and information-based …
A paper published in Nature describes a new approach for removing the pesky problem of dazzle from surface meltwater to yield the first ever continuous, year-round, altimetry measurements of sea-ice thickness in the Arctic Ocean. Artificial intelligence techniques have been applied to CryoSat data in the Arctic to distinguish, during the summer period, the melting …
Climate change is one of the greatest societal challenges of the 21st century. The dominant source of global warming is the increase of anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the Earth`s atmosphere. atmosphere. The two most important of those species are carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). Together they account for ~82% of the anthropogenic radiative forcing. …
