Analysis of Greenland mass changes based on GRACE four-dimensional wavelet decomposition

Abstract

Monitoring the melting of Greenland ice using various sensors is of great importance due to global sea level rise. The mass changes in Greenland can be observed with the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) mission from 2002 to 2016. The GRACE limitations and noise are due to the geometrical and instrumental properties along its orbit, which requires investigations for further improvement. The innovation of this research is to introduce a new method in four-dimensional (4D) wavelet decomposition (WD) for increasing the efficiency of the GRACE signal, used for the reconstruction of the Greenland mass changes. The results show that the overall downward trend in the west Greenland coast is 25.25 ± 6.95 cm/year, and the highest decline rate is 33.60 ± 6.23 cm/year from 2013 to 2016. The northern regions of Greenland have less mass loss than the west and south. For verification, the 4D WD output has been compared with the CryoSat-2 results from 2011 to 2016. The GRACE and CryoSat-2 show a significant correlation of 0.62, which indicates an improvement of 0.18 compared to the forward modelling. The 4D WD improves the overall performance of the reconstructed signal in the frequency time-space domain and reduces the noise in each dimension. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.