In 4DGreenland the overall aim is to advance the current state of knowledge on the hydrology of the Greenland Ice Sheet, by capitalising on the latest advances in Earth Observation data. The high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere have experienced the largest warming over the last decades. The Greenland ice sheet is currently undergoing rapid …
On 19 August 2020, the world’s largest and longest polar research expedition – known as MOSAiC – reached the North Pole after making an unplanned detour owing to lighter-than-usual sea ice conditions. The expedition is now entering its final stage, during which researchers will study the last piece of the Arctic puzzle: the growth of …
A recent report confirms that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, whose mass-loss rates have been rapidly increasing, are matching the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s worst-case sea-level rise scenarios. Read the full story.
The IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in Changing Climate (2019) includes “permafrost carbon and greenhouse gas emissions” as one of the cases characterised by deep uncertainty. The report states that even if there is a very high confidence that “permafrost temperatures have increased to record high levels including the recent increase by …
The project aims to develop the technical basis for an advanced Sentinel-1 Ice Velocity (IV) product for ice sheets and ice caps with improved spatial resolution and accuracy, based on Sentinel-1 interferometric phase measurements.
Accurate estimates of sea ice thickness are essential for numerical weather prediction, ice extent forecasts for navigability and to demonstrate the impacts of climate change on sea ice. The main source of uncertainty in sea ice thickness measurements from radar altimetry is due to snow. Scattering of the radar signal as it travels through snow …
Using CryoSat-2 interferometric synthetic aperture radar (SARIn) altimetry together with NASA’s operation IceBridge and IceSat-2 Lidar data in a multi-layer neural network (NN) in order to enhance CryoSat-2 SARIn swath measurements. Further investigation will be carried out into the use of these corrections to derive surface condition state and change. The European Space Agency (ESA), …
The CryoTEMPO-EOLIS (Elevation Over Land Ice from Swath) product, now operationally available at on the CryoSat Dissemination Server, exploits 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. This is the outcome of a …
According to IMBIE (Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise) most recent analyses, Greenland and Antarctica lost 6.4 trillion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2017 – pushing global sea levels up by 17.8 millimetres, on track with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s worst-case climate warming scenario. Read the full story and Nature scientific articles …
ESA and the European Commission’s Directorate General for Research and Innovation (DG-RTD) have signed an agreement to join forces to provide a coordinated response to the grand science challenges of the next decade. With this agreement ESA and DG-RTD aim at establishing an effective alignment of selected scientific activities under Horizon Europe and FutureEO programmes …
