Tidewater Glacier Frontal Ablation Calculation Tool (TG_FACT)

This processing chain will calculate monthly, three-monthly or annual frontal ablation for Greenlandic tidewater glaciers based on the following open source input data:

1. TermPicks Terminus delineations (Goliber and Black, 2021).
2. Satellite image (for manual delineation of fjord walls).
3. Glacier velocity (code will automatically download ITS_LIVE velocities ~15 GB)
4. Two Digital Elevation Models (preferably ArcticDEM and AeroDEM; Porter et al., 2018, Korsgaard et al., 2016)
5. Surface change rate (Khan, 2017)
6. Bedrock Topography (BedMachine v4; Morlighem et al., 2017, 2021).
7. Solid Ice Discharge (Mankoff, 2019)

The resulting dataset contains the following variables:

• F                      – Frontal ablation during time intervals [Gt/d]
• Max_Error_F   – Maximum error over total time period [Gt/d]
• Date                 – Midpoint of time intervals on which output data defined [yyyy-mm-dd]
• D                     – Discharge during time intervals [Gt/d]
• TMC                – Terminus mass change (dM/dt) during time intervals [Gt/d]

A tutorial on how to run the processing chain is available in the "ReadMe" PDF. 

When using this processing chain, please cite:

Fahrner, D., Slater, D., KC, A., Cenedese, C., Sutherland, D.A., Enderlin, E., de Jong, F., Kjeldsen, K.K., Wood, M., Nienow, P. Nowicki, S., Wagner, T. (2023): A Frontal Ablation Dataset for 49 Tidewater Glaciers in Greenland. 

The complete dataset associated with the publication can be found at https://zenodo.org/records/10278419

References

Goliber, S., & Black, T. (2021). TermPicks: A century of Greenland glacier terminus data for use inmachine learning applications (Version 1). Zenodo. https://zenodo.org/records/5117931

Khan, S. A. (2017). Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Elevation Change. GEUS Data Center. https://doi.org/10.22008/FK2/GQJJEA

Korsgaard, N. J., Nuth, C., Khan, S. A., Kjeldsen, K. K., Bjørk, A. A., Schomacker, A., & Kjær, K. H. (2016). Digital Elevation Model and orthophotographs of Greenland based on aerial photographs from 1978-1987 (G150 AERODEM) (NCEI Accession 0145405). NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.7289/v56q1v72

Morlighem, M., Williams, C. N., Rignot, E., An, L., Arndt, J. E., Bamber, J., Catania, G., Chauché, N., Dowdeswell, J. A., Dorschel, B., & others. (2017). BedMachine v3: Complete bed topography and ocean bathymetry mapping of Greenland from multibeam echo sounding combined with mass conservation. Geophysical Research Letters, 44(21).

Morlighem, M., Williams, C., Rignot, E., An, L., Arndt, J. E., Bamber, J., Catania, G., Chauché, N., Dowdeswell, J. A., Dorschel, B., Fenty, I., Hogan, K., Howat, I., Hubbard, A., Jakobsson, M., Jordan, T. M., Kjeldsen, K. K., Millan, R., Mayer, L., … Zinglersen, K. (2021). IceBridge BedMachine Greenland, Version 4 (Date accessed [24/08/2021]). NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5067/VLJ5YXKCNGXO

Porter, C., Morin, P., Howat, I., Noh, M.-J., Bates, B., Peterman, K., Keesey, S., Schlenk, M., Gardiner, J., Tomko, K., Willis, M., Kelleher, C., Cloutier, M., Husby, E., Foga, S., Nakamura, H., Platson, M., Wethington Jr., M., Williamson, C., … Bojesen, M. A.-N. S. F. A.-N. S. F. (2018). ArcticDEM (V1 ed.). Harvard Dataverse. https://doi.org/doi:10.7910/DVN/OHHUKH