ICESat-2 Land Ice Height Change

  • Released Sunday, May 15, 2022
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At the whole ice sheet scale, this visualization shows the continued draw down of the major outlet glaciers in West Antarctica and in parts of East Antarctica between April 2019 and July 2021. Some areas show hints of blue, indicating places where the ice sheet surface has gone up, reflecting either increased snowfall or changes in ice dynamics.

NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite measures the elevation of Earth’s surfaces – and two data products from the mission map the height of Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, as well as how those ice sheets change over time. The ICESat-2 ATL14 data product provides a reference ice sheet surface corresponding to the ice sheet elevation in April 2019, while ATL15 provides elevation changes to that surface through time. These products are re-generated every 91 days, which is how long it takes ICESat-2 to complete its 1,387 unique orbits and collect a complete grid of measurements. Every time ATL14 and 15 are regenerated, all of the data over the life of the mission is used to improve the April 2019 standard, and best represent how the ice sheets are changing. ATL14 is posted at 100m resolution, and ATL15 is posted at 1 km resolution at one month time resolution.

Along the Siple Coast of West Antarctica, the Mercer, Whillans, and Kamb ice streams feed into the larger floating Ross Ice Shelf. This visualization of ICESat-2 data products shows that elevations are increasing in this sector, due to the long-term slowdown of these ice streams, while small subglacial lakes are evident in bright contrast to the larger scale changes.

In Greenland, ICESat-2 data shows the loss of ice around the margins of the ice sheet between April 2019 and July 2021. Note that the color scale in Greenland spans from a loss of 6 meters (20 feet) to 0 meters, showing that very little of the ice sheet is gaining mass.

Diverging red/blue color bar with range of -2m to 2m. Values near 0 are transparent.

Diverging red/blue color bar with range of -2m to 2m. Values near 0 are transparent.

Diverging red/blue color bar with range of -10m to 10m. Values near 0 are transparent.

Diverging red/blue color bar with range of -10m to 10m. Values near 0 are transparent.

Diverging red/blue color bar with range of -0.35m to 0.35m. Values near 0 are transparent.

Diverging red/blue color bar with range of -0.35m to 0.35m. Values near 0 are transparent.



Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Release date

This page was originally published on Sunday, May 15, 2022.
This page was last updated on Thursday, October 10, 2024 at 12:13 AM EDT.


Datasets used

  • [ICESat-2: Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS)]

    ID: 1112
    Sensor: Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) Dates used: 4/2019-7/2021

Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.