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Antarctic ice shelves; thickness change; CryoSat-2; ICESat; Operation IceBridge

Ice-shelf thickness changes are of critical importance for understanding the stability of the Antarctic ice-sheet because they restrain the seaward flow of grounded glaciers. In this study, we find that neither backscatter nor leading-edge width contained in the least-squares fitting model can improve the accuracy of ice-shelf thickness change estimations from CryoSat-2, which is validated by comparing the CryoSat-2-derived elevation changes from least-squares fitting models with different combinations of waveform parameters against the Operation IceBridge ATM L4 data. Using the model without backscatter and leading-edge width to infer the thickness changes in Antarctic ice shelves from CryoSat-2, we find that the most significant thinning signals are mainly concentrated on the ice shelves along the Amundsen Sea coast, such as Getz, whose thickness variations are dominated by ocean-driven basal melting. This phenomenon has also been confirmed by the ICESat results. Overall, the Antarctic ice shelves volume changed on average by $–0.34 \pm 66.36 \rm{km^{3} yr^{-1}}$ during the period from July 2010 to December 2016.

BAOJUN ZHANG¹ JINGBIN LIU¹ ZEMIN WANG² TINGTING LIU² QUANMING YANG²

1. State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430 079, China.
2. Chinese Antarctic Center of Surveying and Mapping, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430 079, China.

Published

30 May 2020

Manuscript received

16 October 2019

Manuscript revised

16 February 2020

Accepted

25 February 2020

Early published

Unedited version published online

Final version published online

25 May 2020