ICESat laser altimetry over small mountain glaciers

Treichler, Désirée; Kääb, Andreas

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-10-2129-2016

Articles | Volume 10, issue 5

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-10-2129-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-10-2129-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 10, issue 5

Research article

|

16 Sep 2016

Research article |

| 16 Sep 2016

ICESat laser altimetry over small mountain glaciers

Désirée Treichler and Andreas Kääb

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-10-2129-2016-supplement

Data sets

Glacier outlines NVE (Norges Vassdrags- og energidirektorat) https://www.nve.no/hydrology/glaciers/glacier-data

NASA Shuttle Radar Topography Mission Global 30 arc second NASA JPL https://doi.org/10.5067/MEaSUREs/SRTM/SRTMGL30.002

GLAS/ICESat L1 and L2 Global Altimetry Data, Version 34 NSIDC http://nsidc.org/data/docs/daac/glas_icesat_l1_l2_global_altimetry.gd.html

GLIMS Glacier Database, Version 1 GLIMS and NSIDC https://doi.org/10.7265/N5V98602

Short summary

Satellite data are often the only source of information on mountain glaciers. We show that data from ICESat laser satellite can accurately reflect glacier volume development in 2003–2008, also for individual years. We detect a spatially varying elevation bias in commonly used data sets, and provide a correction that strongly increases the significance of the glacier change estimates – a crucial driver of climate-induced meltwater changes that directly affect the life of lowland populations.