Systematic Errors Observed in CryoSat-2 Elevation Swaths on Mountain Glaciers and Their Implications

Our awareness of ice caps’ and mountain glaciers’ sensitivity to climate change has driven major advances in the application of remote sensing techniques during the past decade. Regarding ESA’s SARIn altimeter CryoSat-2, processing the full waveform to generate swaths of elevation estimates has become standard practice in regions of complex topographies. This technique provides information on areas where we would be blind otherwise. In this article, we discuss systematic errors and analyze their impact on surface elevation measurements and change rates of two test areas. In particular, we focus on periodically occurring errors in elevation swaths, caused by the superposition of coherent signals from range-ambiguous surfaces. They can lead to measurement errors in excess of 10 m, affect most measurements in mountainous regions, are difficult to exclude with established post-processing techniques, and occur repeatedly for satellite revisits introducing a 369-day periodicity—difficult to distinguish from the annual cycle. We show a correlation between derived elevation swaths and the sensor view angle and explore the influence of common data exclusion choices on higher level products. Our results indicate that these systematic errors hold a substantial share of the error budget and that the choice of thresholds impacts higher level products. We conclude that error correlations need to be considered to characterize the data accuracy. With the established data editing strategies, systematic errors prevent resolving seasonal mass changes of single mountain glacier basins and impact aggregates over larger areas or longer periods.