Greenland Ice Sheet wide supraglacial lake evolution and dynamics: insights from the 2018 and 2019 melt seasons

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Authors

Devon Dunmire, Aneesh Subramanian, Emam Hossain, Md Osman Gani, Alison Banwell, Hammad Younas, Brendan M Myers

Abstract

Supraglacial lakes on the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) can impact both the ice sheet surface mass balance and ice dynamics. Thus, understanding the evolution and dynamics of supraglacial lakes is important to provide improved parameterizations for ice sheet models to enable better projections of future GrIS changes. In this study, we utilize the growing inventory of optical and microwave satellite imagery to automatically determine the fate of Greenland-wide supraglacial lakes during 2018 and 2019; cool and warm melt seasons respectively. We develop a novel time series classification method to categorize lakes into four classes: 1) refreezing, 2) rapidly draining, 3) slowly draining, and 4) buried. Our findings reveal significant interannual variability between the two melt seasons, with a notable increase in the proportion of draining lakes in 2019. We also find that as mean lake depth increases, so does the percentage of lakes that drain, indicating that lake depth may influence hydrofracture potential. However, we also observe that non-draining lakes are deeper during the cooler 2018 melt season, suggesting that additional factors may predispose lakes to drain earlier in a warmer year. Our automatic classification approach and the resulting two-year ice-sheet-wide dataset provide unprecedented insights into GrIS supraglacial lake dynamics and evolution, offering a valuable resource for future research.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31223/X5871P

Subjects

Glaciology

Keywords

Greenland ice sheet, hydrology, time series classification, hydrofracture, supraglacial lakes

Dates

Published: 2024-07-29 18:17

Last Updated: 2024-07-30 01:17

License

No Creative Commons license

Additional Metadata

Data Availability (Reason not available):
Data and code will be publicly available on acceptance of the publication, which is under review at Earth and Space Sciences