Surface meltwater runoff routing through a coupled supraglacial-proglacial drainage system, Inglefield Land, northwest Greenland

Li, Ya; Yang, Kang; Gao, Shuai; Smith, L. C.; Fettweis, Xavier; Li, Manchun

doi:10.1016/j.jag.2021.102647

Cited by 8 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…The seasonal development of the drainage network is shown to transform from a system initially dominated by water percolation to one dominated by channelised, efficient flow (Fig. 4); further confirming behaviour identified across multiple supraglacial drainage mapping studies across the GrIS (Lu et al, 2021;Yang et al, 2021;Li et al, 2022).…”

Section: Temporal Evolution Of the Supraglacial Drainage Networksupporting

confidence: 67%

“…In comparison, the sub-parallel drainage structure of the supraglacial network in the southern sector largely consists of continuously-flowing rivers that drain surface meltwater from the slush zone at ~1500 m a.s.l to much lower elevations (200 m a.s.l), with some rivers directly terminating off the ice sheet, suggesting limited opportunities for meltwater to penetrate to the ice sheet bed. Similar drainage hydromorphology was also mapped at the neighbouring glacier at Inglefield Land (Yang et al, 2019a;Li et al, 2022), with supraglacial rivers flowing uninterrupted into the proglacial zone. Within this southern sector of HG, ice velocity is significantly slower (<100 m yr -1 ; Rignot et al, 2021) than its northern counterpart, with relatively thick, broadly impermeable ice contributing to the absence of crevasses and moulins (Oswald and Gogineni, 2011;Yang et al, 2019a;Andrews et al, 2022), as well as controlling the hydromorphology of the drainage network found here.…”

Section: Spatial Characteristics Of the Supraglacial Drainage Networksupporting

confidence: 61%

“…To effectively delineate supraglacial rivers from remotely sensed imagery, an automatic linear enhancement method developed by Yang et al (2015) was used, which characterises supraglacial rivers according to their Gaussian-like brightness cross sections and longitudinal open channel morphology. Firstly, a Normalised Difference Water Index was performed following McFeeters (1996) to differentiate active surface meltwater from the background ice and snow (Lu et al, 2020;Li et al, 2022). This equation (Eq.1) utilises Band 3 ('Green') and Band 8 ('NIR') from Sentinel-2 imagery, as follows:…”

Section: Supraglacial River and Lake Extractionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In particular, meltwater delivery into an inefficient subglacial configuration, such as linked cavities (Kamb, 1987) which typically occurs during the early period of the melt season, can temporarily overwhelm the subglacial hydrologic system, increasing water pressure and enhancing subsequent sliding (Andrews et al, 2014;Davidson et al, 2019). In some regions where moulins and crevasses are absent, supraglacial rivers can extend undisturbed for tens of kilometres across the bare ice surface, flowing directly into the proglacial zone (Yang et al, 2019a;Li et al, 2022). Ultimately, much of this meltwater will end up in the ocean, contributing directly to global sea level rise (Pitcher and Smith, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Seasonal evolution of the supraglacial drainage network at Humboldt Glacier, North Greenland, between 2016 and 2020

Rawlins

Rippin

Sole

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Abstract. Supraglacial rivers and lakes are important for the routing and storage of surface meltwater during the summer melt season across the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS), yet remain poorly mapped and quantified across the northern part of the ice sheet, which is rapidly losing mass. Here we produce, for the first time, a high-resolution record of the supraglacial drainage network (including both rivers and lakes) and its seasonal behaviour at Humboldt Glacier, a wide-outlet glacier draining a large hydrologic catchment (13,488 km2), spanning the period 2016 to 2020 using 10 m spatial resolution Sentinel-2 imagery. Our results reveal a perennially extensive yet interannually-variable supraglacial network extending from an elevation of 200 m a.s.l to a maximum of ~1440 m a.s.l recorded in 2020, with limited development of the network observed in the low melt years of 2017 and 2018. The supraglacial drainage network is shown to cover an area ranging between 965.7 km2 (2018) and 1566.3 km2 (2019) at its maximum seasonal extent, with spatial coverage of up to 2685 km2 recorded during the early phases of the melt season when a slush zone is most prominent. Up-glacier expansion and the development of an efficient supraglacial drainage network as surface runoff increases and the snowline retreats is clearly visible. Preconditioning of the ice surface following a high melt year is also observed, with the earlier widespread exposure of the supraglacial drainage network in 2020 compared to other years; a finding that may become representative with persistent warmer years into the future. Overall, this study provides evidence of a persistent, yet dynamic, supraglacial drainage network at this prominent northern GrIS outlet glacier and advances our understanding of such hydrologic processes, particularly under ongoing climatic warming and enhanced runoff.

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Section: Temporal Evolution Of the Supraglacial Drainage Networksupporting

confidence: 67%

Section: Spatial Characteristics Of the Supraglacial Drainage Networksupporting

confidence: 61%

Section: Supraglacial River and Lake Extractionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Seasonal evolution of the supraglacial drainage network at Humboldt Glacier, North Greenland, between 2016 and 2020

Rawlins

Rippin

Sole

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The estimates can also be used to analyze the river discharge and other hydrological elements over more complete and longer periods. Finally, as satellitederived water extent is with high accuracy and well correlated with modeled runoff [46], the remote sensing derived discharge has the potential to serve as an effective metric for improving the modeled runoff accuracy.…”

Section: Advantages and Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discharge Estimation With Improved Methods Using MODIS Data in Greenland: An Application in the Watson River

Lin

Cheng

Zheng

et al. 2022

IEEE J. Sel. Top. Appl. Earth Observations Remote Sensing

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Greenland's river discharge has important implications for the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) mass balance, global sea-level rise, and climate change. However, long-term and continuous in-situ discharge data for Greenland are scarce. The water extent is an important proxy to estimate discharge using remote sensing, but previous studies on estimating the discharge in Greenland required in-situ reflectance data to construct the water extent and suffered from inefficient processing. Here, we derived the water extent solely from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) daily reflectance product on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud platform. To improve the accuracy and efficiency, we optimized the strategies for water extent estimation and the optimal gauge pixel selection. Our improved method was applied in the Watson River. The runoff data from the regional climate model RACMO2 were employed to compare with the estimated results. Our results provide the daily discharge of the Watson River from 2002 to 2021, covering the period when field observations are unavailable. The correlation coefficient (R) and the fractional root mean square error (fRMSE) between the daily estimated discharge and the in-situ discharge are 0.69 and 0.73, respectively, whereas the R and fRMSE are 0.85 and 0.53 at a monthly timescale, respectively. Comparisons between our results and the RACMO2 runoff data suggest that the RACMO2 may generally underestimate the annual ice sheet melt runoff but overestimates the monthly runoff in July by 30% on average. The proposed method is highly automated, efficient and has the potential to be applied in other rivers with field measurements to provide continuous and long-term discharge observations. It contributes to a better understanding of the response of the GrIS to climate change

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High-resolution global water body datasets underestimate the extent of small rivers

Mao

Yang

Zhang

et al. 2022

International Journal of Remote Sensing

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Surface meltwater runoff routing through a coupled supraglacial-proglacial drainage system, Inglefield Land, northwest Greenland

Cited by 8 publications

References 45 publications

Seasonal evolution of the supraglacial drainage network at Humboldt Glacier, North Greenland, between 2016 and 2020

Seasonal evolution of the supraglacial drainage network at Humboldt Glacier, North Greenland, between 2016 and 2020

Discharge Estimation With Improved Methods Using MODIS Data in Greenland: An Application in the Watson River

High-resolution global water body datasets underestimate the extent of small rivers

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