Ice mass balance over the polar region and its uncertainty

극지방 빙하량 변화 (ice-mass balance) 관측과 에러 분석

  • Seo, Ki-Weon (Polar Earth System Div., Korea Polar Research Institute)
  • 서기원 (극지연구소, 극지지구시스템 연구부)
  • Published : 2007.12.05

Abstract

Current estimates of the ice-mass balance over the Greenland and the Antarctica using retrievals of time-varying gravity from GRACE are presented. Two different GRACE gravity data, UTCSR RL01 and UTCSR RL04, are used for the estimates to examine the impact of the relative accuracy of background models in the GRACE data processing for inter-annual variations of GRACE gravity data. In addition, the ice-mass balance is appraised from the conventional GRACE data, which represents global gravity, and the filtered GRACE data, which isolates the terrestrial gravity effect from GRACE gravity data. The former estimate shows that there exists similar negative trends of ice-mass balance over the Greenland from UTCSR RL01 and UTCSR RL04 while the time series from the both GRACE data over the Antarctica differ significantly from each other, and no apparent trends are observed. The result for the Greenland from the latter calculation is similar to the former estimate. However, the latter calculation presents positive trends of ice-mass balance for the Antarctica from both GRACE data. These results imply that residual oceanic geophysical signals, particularly for ocean tides, significantly corrupt the ice-mass estimate over the Antarctica as leakage error. In addition, the spatial alias of GRACE is likely to affect the ice-mass balance because the spatial spectrum of ocean tides is not conserved via GRACE sampling, and thus ocean tides contaminate terrestrial gravity signal. To minimize the alias effect, I suggest to use the combined gravity models from GRACE, SLR and polar motion.

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