Recent advances in monitoring surface mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet

With temperatures in the Arctic rising rapidly at a rate of 3-4 times the global mean, monitoring the state of the Greenland ice sheet has never been more relevant.

In-situ observations from the Arctic, in particular from the Greenland ice sheet, are scarce due to the cost and difficulty of maintaining instrumentation in the harsh and remote environment. Yet, the fate of the ice sheet concerns 100s of millions of people living in coastal zones worldwide. To gain understanding of the ice sheet processes leading to sea level rise and increase our ability to capture those in climate models, there is an urgent need to collect in-situ observations from the ice sheet surface. Similarly, ground-truthing observations are necessary for validation and calibration of satellite-derived estimates of ice sheet change.

The Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), along with partner institutions Asiaq and DTU Space, currently operates a combined network of 40 automatic weather stations (AWS) on ice in Greenland, mainly through the Programme for Monitoring of the Greenland Ice Sheet (PROMICE) and the Greenland Climate Network (GC-Net).

GEUS has implemented a new pipeline providing near-real-time hourly weather observations from the PROMICE and GC-Net stations to its users and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) for use in numerical weather prediction. The satellite-transmitted AWS data is processed and submitted to the WMO via the Danish Meteorological Institute with a latency of 7 minutes after observations are recorded.

Here, we present the recent advances in our AWS instrumentation, data processing and database solution to invite discussion on how we can best meet the community needs for in-situ observations from the ice sheet.