A decade of winter supraglacial lake drainage across Northeast Greenland using C-band SAR

Abstract. This study presents a comprehensive, multi-year assessment of winter supraglacial lake drainages on the Northeast Greenland Ice Sheet, detailing cascading drainage events, examining links to melt-season conditions, and evaluating their potential impact on ice dynamics. Supraglacial lakes can drain rapidly, delivering meltwater to the ice-sheet bed, increasing basal water pressure, reducing friction, and accelerating ice flow. Such drainage events are well-documented across Greenland during the melt season using optical satellite imagery. Recent studies using satellite and airborne radar data reveal that many supraglacial lakes persist beyond summer and may also drain during winter, potentially affecting ice dynamics in a manner similar to melt-season drainages. Here, we use C-band synthetic aperture radar imagery from Sentinel-1 and RADARSAT Constellation Mission spanning ten consecutive winters (2014/2015–2023/2024), to detect winter lake drainages. We develop a normalization method to integrate images from varying acquisition geometries, enabling high-temporal-resolution monitoring. Our analysis identifies 90 winter drainage events from 55 unique lakes, exhibiting substantial interannual variability – from a maximum of 18 events in winter 2018/2019 to a minimum of four events in both 2020/2021 and 2021/2022. Drainages occurred most frequently in early winter, with decreasing frequency as winter progressed. Approximately half of the observed drainages were part of 13 cascading events, each involving two to seven lakes over distances up to ~33 km. Comparisons with preceding melt-season conditions reveal negative correlations between winter drainage frequency and both melt-season intensity and melt-season drainage frequency. Ice velocity analyses over the ten-year period show no sustained seasonal or annual increases attributable to winter drainages, although isolated short-term increases (6–12-day) were observed.