Surface Mass Balance Loading in Antarctica 1979 - 2022

Created 05/03/2026

Updated 05/03/2026

The purpose of this study is to evaluate performance of seven different SMB estimates by using GPS vertical deformation timeseries.

Data contain the information on elastic displacements at GPS sties in Antarctica from 1979 to 2022, derived from seven SMB products namely RACMO2.4p1 (11 km spatial resolution, monthly temporal resolution), RACMO2.3p2 (27 km, monthly), a downscaled version of RACMO2.3p2 (2 km, monthly), MAR v3.11 (35 km, monthly), GEMB (10 km, monthly), HIRHAM5 (12.5 km, monthly) and MERRA-2 (12.5 km, 5 days).

We generated the SMB mass variability time series spanning 1980-2022 by first computing, for each SMB model, the SMB anomalies from the long-term mean SMB computed over 1980-2022. The resulting SMB anomalies were cumulatively summed, detrended, and bilinearly interpolated onto a common regular grid of 2 km resolution. A uniform land mask (Mosaic of Antarctica version 2), defining the extent of the grounded ice sheet (including the offshore islands), was applied to the grid after resampling to the same 2 km resolution.

We computed elastic displacements derived from each of these SMB models by converting the detrended SMB mass anomalies at each location and time into arrays of cylinders defined with 1 km radius and a height representing the equivalent ice mass. These arrays were subsequently input into the Regional ElAstic Rebound calculator (REAR, v1.5), adopting the Preliminary Reference Earth Model (PREM) to compute the elastic loading displacements in a centre-of-solid Earth (CE) reference frame at each GPS site location.

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Additional Info

Field Value
Title Surface Mass Balance Loading in Antarctica 1979 - 2022
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/a339fa83-0fbb-450c-b186-1bf8919c4f53
Contact Point
Australian Ocean Data Network
jenan.rajavarathan@utas.edu.au
Reference Period 01/01/1979 - 31/12/2022
Geospatial Coverage Australia
Data Portal Australian Oceans Data Network

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Australian Oceans Data Network "Surface Mass Balance Loading in Antarctica 1979 - 2022". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://catalogue.aodn.org.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/surface-mass-balance-loading-in-antarctica-1979-2022