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GreenSAR—Greenland and Antarctic Grounding Lines from SAR Data

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Remote Sensing Advances for Earth System Science

Part of the book series: Springer Earth System Sciences ((SPRINGEREARTH))

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Abstract

The Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheet (GIS and AIS) are currently losing mass. The GreenSAR project aims at improving the knowledge of essential climate variables by exploiting Earth Observation (EO) datasets from past, present and future European Space Agency (ESA) satellite missions. The project is built around the measure of grounding line migration at the ice–ocean interface. Here, we show that the grounding line of the Pine Island Glacier (PIG) has retreated continuously for the past 20 years due to sustained thinning. The Petermann Gletscher glacier grounding line shows little change in the past 20 years despite the two recent large calving events reducing the area of the floating tongue by 40%.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Diego Fernandez, Yves-Louis Desnos, Marcus Engdhal, Roberto Sabia from ESA for their support. We acknowledge the use of data and/or data products from CReSIS generated with support from NSF Grant ANT-0424589 and NASA Grant NNX10AT68G. DEMs used are the ASTER GDEM (http://gdem.ersdac.jspacesystems.or.jp) and GIMP DEM (http://bprc.osu.edu/GDG/gimpdem.php).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Noel Gourmelen

  2. Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea

    JeongWon Park

  3. CPOM, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Andrew Shepherd

Authors
  1. Noel Gourmelen
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  2. JeongWon Park
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  3. Andrew Shepherd
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Noel Gourmelen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. European Space Agency, ESA-ESRIN, EO Science, Applications and Future Technologies Department, VIa Galileo Galilei SN, 00044 Frascati, Roma, Italy

    Diego Fernández-Prieto

  2. Telespazio-Vega for European Space Agency, ESA-ESTEC, Mission Science Division, Keplerlaan 1, 2201 AZ, Noordwijk, Zuid-Holland, The Netherlands

    Roberto Sabia

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Gourmelen, N., Park, J., Shepherd, A. (2016). GreenSAR—Greenland and Antarctic Grounding Lines from SAR Data. In: Fernández-Prieto, D., Sabia, R. (eds) Remote Sensing Advances for Earth System Science. Springer Earth System Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16952-1_3

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