the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 02 Nov 2023
Mapping the vertical heterogeneity of Greenland’s firn from 2011–2019 using airborne radar and laser altimetry
Anja Rutishauser
Kirk Michael Scanlan
Baptiste Vandecrux
Nanna B. Karlsson
Nicolas Jullien
Andreas Peter Ahlstrøm
Robert S. Fausto
Penelope How
Abstract. The firn layer on the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) plays a crucial role in buffering surface meltwater runoff, which is constrained by the available firn pore space and impermeable ice layers that limit deeper meltwater percolation. Understanding these firn properties is essential for predicting current and future meltwater runoff and its contribution to global sea-level rise. While very high-frequency (VHF) radars have been extensively used for surveying the GrIS, their lower bandwidth restricts direct firn stratigraphy extraction. In this study, we use concurrent VHF airborne radar and laser altimetry data collected as part of Operation Ice Bridge (OIB) over the period 2011–2019 to investigate vertical offsets in the radar surface reflection (dz). Our results, corroborated by modelling and firn core analyses, show that a dz larger than 1 m is strongly related to the vertical heterogeneity of a firn profile, and effectively delineates between vertically homogeneous and vertically heterogeneous firn profiles. Temporal variations in dz align with climatic events and reveal an expansion of heterogeneous firn between 2011–2013 covering an area of ~338,450 km2, followed by firn replenishment over the years 2014–2019 spanning an area of ~664,734 km2. Our approach reveals the firn evolution of key regions on the Greenland Ice Sheet, providing valuable insights for detecting potential alterations in meltwater runoff patterns.
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Anja Rutishauser et al.
Status: open (until 14 Dec 2023)
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RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2023-2385', Anonymous Referee #1, 17 Nov 2023
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This manuscript describes a new method for characterizing the vertical heterogeneity of Greenland’s firn using VHF radar sounding and coincident laser altimetry measurements. Using full-wave electromagnetic modeling, the authors show that the offset in the apparent surface elevation measured by these two instruments increases significantly when one or more ice layers are present within the range resolution of the radar system. They demonstrate that this is due to constructive and destructive interference amongst layers that shifts the apparent location of the surface echo in the radar sounding data. The authors then map this offset across Greenland using OIB MCoRDS and ATM data collected between 2011-2019 and discuss the spatial and temporal trends in the context of regional climate. In particular, they show that their method captures both the inland expansion of ice layers following extreme melt in 2012 and the later replenishment of pore space in Southwest Greenland during a period of cooler summers from 2014-2018.
This is a technically complete and well-written paper that introduces an interesting new method for studying the heterogeneity of Greenland’s firn. It is exciting to see that that the apparent reduction in shallow ice content since 2012 holds at a larger scale than the initial firn core studies in Southwest Greenland, and this seems like a promising method for tracking trends in percolation zone extent and structure. I have some comments on framing and small details, but overall, I think this is an excellent piece of work.
Major Comments:
[1] The motivation for the study, and particularly why the use of VHF radar sounding together with altimetry, did not come across clearly to me in the introduction. The authors list a slew of methods that are currently applied to study firn properties, but do not clearly establish what gap their method is then trying to fill. I think this is particularly important in Greenland because UHF Accumulation Radar data that can directly resolve the firn structure is available in all but one of the years that this study presents, so it is not immediately clear why one would want to use the VHF and laser altimeter combination instead. I think there may be some compelling reasons – for example, portability to Antarctica, where almost no Accumulation Radar data was collected – but the paper would be strengthened if the authors laid those motivations out in the introduction.
[2] Might surface roughness also modulate dz? I could image that for the radar, coherent integration of reflections from facets with different heights could set up constructive or destructive interference patterns (similar to layers at different depths) that might shift the surface height from the expected average of the facet heights. The anomalously high dz values in a few spots in the interior make me wonder if features like sastrugi might impact the retrievals at all.
[3] What is the typical spread of values within the each 10km grid cell in Figure 7? Does the variability in dz provide any additional information, particularly in terms of the quality of the retrieval? To me, it seems like a potentially useful quantification of uncertainty in the boundaries between radar facies, which is somewhat lacking in the current version of the paper. I could also imagine that dz would be highly variable in the percolation zone, but maybe the dz anomalies in the interior would show a more consistent bias if they’re formed by some localized by consistent density anomaly.
Minor Comments:
Line 79: Note that the MCoRDS documentation gives an empirical windowing factor of 1.53 for a 20% Tukey window on transmit/receive plus a frequency domain hanning window (https://data.cresis.ku.edu/data/rds/rds_readme.pdf). That seems to be more consistent with the current processing parameters for the MCoRDS data – Rodriguez-Morales et al. (2014) reports a processing chain that using a much more aggressive Blackman window on receive, which does not match up with what is in the current processing spreadsheets.
Lines 81 – 82: this seems not quite right for the various horizontal resolutions. The formula given is for the pulse-limited cross-track resolution, but needs to be noted as such, because the MCoRDS data have undergone synthetic aperture focusing and have a much smaller footprint in the along-track direction. The nominal along-track resolution should be ~25 m after focusing and incoherent summation, and typically the trace spacing is about half that (~14 m as correctly noted here). (Again, see the data documentation: https://data.cresis.ku.edu/data/rds/rds_readme.pdf.)
Line 115: Since you upsample by a factor of 10 before picking the surface, I would think that the vertical picking error should be +/- ~3 ns which would translate to height offsets of 0.32-0.27 m.
Line 117: Considering my comments on the along-track resolution, perhaps specify here what the total length of your moving average window actually is.
Figure 2: it’s hard to see the difference between black and blue in the figure, perhaps do something with more contrast like black and red?
Line 134: give the cutoff number for the maximum deviation from the straight line here for reproducibility.
Line 145: Are there significant differences in the ablation zone dz offset between different flights within the same season? If so, is only using the west coast for calibration adequate? For example, I might expect some flights in North Greenland not to cross this calibration area.
Line 148: Is the distribution generally close to gaussian in these 10 km grids cells? Is there much difference if you look at the median vs mean?
Line 161: Is a citation to a paper missing here? Courville & Perry (2021) seems to be a software, so it’s not clear what “Equation 15” is in that context. The software also appears to use csv input of the ideal transmit waveform, rather than an equation.
Line 195: does variability in the dry firn density matter? In the dry snow zone that can lead to a standard deviation of small scale density variations on the order ~35 kg/m^3 near the surface, which maps to plausible density contrasts of up to ~100 kgm^3 just from hoar formation and wind scour (Hörhold et al., 2011) (see the North Greenland Traverse cores high resolution measurements as an example). At least one previous statistical model of typical firn profiles did try to take this into account, but was also looking primarily at ice lenses impacts (Culberg & Schroeder, 2020).
Line 246: Okay, generally answers my question above, but given that later on your median offset in the percolation zone is only 2.2 m, it does make me wonder dry firn variability matters (and might be another explanation for the strange areas of large dz in the dry snow zone).
Section 3.1: not suggesting that you should actually do this for this particular paper, but it is possible to reprocess the OIB MCoRDS data with a higher vertical sampling rate. The posted data has been downsampled by at least a factor of 2 in the vertical and is not the native sampling rate of the radar. It might be worth mentioning in the discussion or future work for others considering using this method.
Figure 9: can the snow radar tell you anything about what is going on here with its higher resolution? For example, rule in or out very thin layers of higher density near the surface due to wind scour or other such processes?
Line 402: might be an appropriate place to also point to (Rennermalm et al., 2021)?
Line 465: I am not sure that this mapping method adds much to this beyond showing the limits of the percolation zone.
Line 473: Summit and NEEM both had evidence of thin ice crust/layer formation after 2012, so if it is indeed being buried slowly, it could maybe explain some of these anomalies (though doesn’t help with what’s already there in spring 2012) (Nghiem et al., 2012).
Line 493: Given that dz often has something to do with multiple peaks in the radar data, I expect this might work really well for capturing the same kinds of properties and would let you get around the need for coincident laser altimetry collection, which would be great.
References:
Culberg, R., & Schroeder, D. M. (2020). Strong Potential for the Detection of Refrozen Ice Layers in Greenland’s Firn By Airborne Radar Sounding. IGARSS 2020, 7033–7036.
Hörhold, M. W., Kipfstuhl, S., Wilhelms, F., Freitag, J., & Frenzel, A. (2011). The densification of layered polar firn. Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, 116(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1029/2009JF001630
Nghiem, S. V., Hall, D. K., Mote, T. L., Tedesco, M., Albert, M. R., Keegan, K., Shuman, C. A., DiGirolamo, N. E., & Neumann, G. (2012). The extreme melt across the Greenland ice sheet in 2012. Geophysical Research Letters, 39(20), Article 20. https://doi.org/10.1029/2012GL053611
Rennermalm, Å. K., Hock, R., Covi, F., Xiao, J., Corti, G., Kingslake, J., Leidman, S. Z., Miège, C., Macferrin, M., Machguth, H., Osterberg, E., Kameda, T., & McConnell, J. R. (2021). Shallow firn cores 1989–2019 in southwest Greenland’s percolation zone reveal decreasing density and ice layer thickness after 2012. Journal of Glaciology, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1017/jog.2021.102
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-2385-RC1
Anja Rutishauser et al.
Anja Rutishauser et al.
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