Abstract

Tracking Snow Accumulation in Greenland with CReSIS Snow Radar
Ryan D. Everett, Dr. David Braaten, Dr. George Tsoflias, Anthony Hoch, and Shu Chen, Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, the University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045

Tracking the internal layers of snow in inland Greenland is necessary to better understand the annual precipitation. A year to year data record for the amount of precipitation falling onto Greenland can be analyzed alongside with ice calving and melting data to yield a mass balance for the ice sheet which can be interpreted as increasing or decreasing sea levels worldwide. On May 6th, 2011, a NASA P3 aircraft flew along the ice divide between the ice cores of NEEM and Northgrip sending radar signals to the surface and collecting data from the snow. Eighteen layers were tracked using the Kingdom Suite and then were further analyzed with MatLab. It was found that approximately fifty-five centimeters of snow falls annually over the past two decades. The deeper the layer, the denser the snow, and thus a density profile in terms of depth is needed to compare individual layers to one another. The water equivalent of the thickness of the snow layers is the most accurate reference for how much precipitation had fallen in a given year.