ESSDD Earth System Science Data Discussions ESSDD Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss. 1866-3591 Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/essd-2023-411 A Frontal Ablation Dataset for 49 Tidewater Glaciers in Greenland Fahrner Dominik 1 Slater Donald 2 KC Aman 3 Cenedese Claudia 4 Sutherland David A. 1 Enderlin Ellyn https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8266-7719 3 de Jong Femke https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5683-0570 5 Kjeldsen Kristian K. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8557-5131 6 Wood Michael https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3074-7845 7 8 Nienow Peter 2 Nowicki Sophie https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6328-5590 9 Wagner Till https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4572-1285 10 University of Oregon, Department of Earth Sciences, USA University of Edinburgh, School of Geosciences, UK Boise State University, Department of Geosciences, USA Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Physical Oceanography Department, USA Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, the Netherlands Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Denmark Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, San JosĂ© State University, USA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, USA University at Buffalo, Department of Geology, USA University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, USA 11 12 2023 2023 1 28 Copyright: © 2023 Dominik Fahrner et al. 2023 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is available from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2023-411/ The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2023-411/essd-2023-411.pdf

Frontal ablation at tidewater glaciers, which comprises iceberg calving, submarine and subaerial melting, is a key boundary condition for numerical ice sheet models but remains difficult to measure directly in-situ. Many previous studies have quantified frontal ablation over varying spatio-temporal scales, however most use ice discharge as an approximation for frontal ablation, thereby neglecting the influence of terminus location change. Frontal ablation estimates that do account for terminus location change are spatio-temporally limited by the availability of observational data. Here, we present a processing chain to quantify frontal ablation using open-source observational data. We apply the processing chain to 49 tidewater glaciers in Greenland with reliable near-terminus bathymetry data in the BedMachine V4 dataset. Near-terminus volume change over the time period 1987–2020 is determined using a previously published dataset of terminus positions (TermPicks), ice thicknesses from ArcticDEM and AeroDEM, adjusted for surface elevation change over time, and bathymetry data from BedMachine v4. Assuming a vertical terminus geometry and uniform ice density, we estimate frontal ablation as the difference between mass flux towards the terminus (Mankoff, 2019) and mass change between consecutive observation. The frontal ablation dataset offers exciting opportunities for developing new insights into ice dynamics, including helping to improve numerical model hindcasting and projections. Lastly, we provide a processing chain that may serve as a community standard for determining frontal ablation from observational data for any tidewater glacier.

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