Greenland Ice Sheet Snowline

Example of a snowline retrieval for the Greenland ice sheet.

Jason Box and Christine Chen

Each year at the end of the melt season, the maximum altitude where winter snow survives is a convenient indicator of the competing effects of surface mass loss from melting and surface mass gain from snow accumulation.

Here, we measure the time dependence of snowline on the Greenland ice sheet using end of melt season visible-band retrievals from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) imagery from years 2000-2011. These retrievals are calibrated using nearby K-transect surface mass balance observations of van de Wal et al. (2012) and applied to the Greenland ice sheet.

Download the Data

We post the snow line retrievals here for anonymous download. If the data are to be used in climatological analysis or publication, we trust data users to contact us to discuss our input. The most up to date citation for these data is Box et al. (2009).

Works Cited

• Box, J.E., R.J., Benson, D. Decker, D.H. Bromwich, Greenland ice sheet snow line variations 2000-2008, Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Las Vegas, NV, 22-27 March, 2009.
• van de Wal, R. S. W., Boot, W., Smeets, C. J. P. P., Snellen, H., van den Broeke, M. R., and Oerlemans, J.: Twenty-one years of mass balance observations along the K-transect, West Greenland, Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss., 5, 351-363, doi: 10.5194/essdd-5-351-2012, 2012.

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