Image credit: Jack Holt

Snow4Flow Overview

Quantifying the ongoing retreat of glaciers and ice sheets – and projecting their futures – are major societal concerns due to their contribution to sea-level rise and influence on water resources, natural hazards, and associated socioeconomic impacts. The ability to confidently project glacier and ice-sheet mass change is limited by a severe lack of observations that reliably constrain both their input (Snow) and output (Flow) mass fluxes. Snow4Flow will capture the spatial variability in snow accumulation and ice volume across 4 Northern Hemisphere regions containing hundreds of rapidly changing glaciers to deliver more reliable, societally relevant projections of land-ice change. This major advance requires spatially extensive radar-sounding surveys that are not possible from orbit. This EVS-4 mission will drive foundational improvements to NH land-ice boundary conditions and forcing data – including orographic precipitation patterns in alpine environments, ice thickness and subglacial topography – and directly leverages them into state-of-the-art models and projections.

Our key science questions are:

1. How will Northern Hemisphere glaciers respond to climate change through the end of the 21st century?
2. How does snow accumulation vary in regions of high topographic relief?