25 Year Time Series of Multiple-Satellite Ice Sheet Changes: the ESA Climate Change Initiative

Understanding the long-term changes in the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica has global climate significance, especially on long term global sea level rise predictions. Having validated satellite data on current and recent past changes of the ice sheets are crucial for validating climate and earth system models, and give good opportunities for space geodesy to play an important role for society.

Under the ESA Climate Change Initiative two projects on Greenland and Antarctica ice sheet changes are making past and present space measurements of the ice sheets available for use by scientists, stakeholders and the general public. The data are part of a large set of ECV’s (Essential Climate Variables) made available by the ESA Climate Initiative, as a contribution to the global Climate Observing System.

The ECV data produced include detailed elevation change data from radar altimetry ice flow velocities from synthetic aperture radar missions, mass changes from GRACE, as well as data of glacier and ice shelf grounding lines and (for Greenland) glacier calving front locations from radar and optical data.

In the poster we highlight current CCI results on changes in Greenland, with special focus on 25 year elevation changes from ERS-1, ERS-2, Envisat and CryoSat, as well as the Greenland-wide velocity mapping, and the GRACE mass change results.