Shen, X., Fan, Y., Livingstone, S.J. orcid.org/0000-0002-1021-6679 et al. (1 more author) (2026) Assessment of SWOT for monitoring ice-marginal lake water levels in Greenland. Geophysical Research Letters, 53 (5). e2025GL120513. ISSN: 0094-8276
Abstract
The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite mission provides a powerful data set for monitoring global surface water resources. However, its performance for monitoring ice-marginal lakes in Greenland remains unknown. Due to the scarcity of in situ measurements, this study evaluated the reliability of ice-marginal lake elevations derived from the SWOT Water Mask Raster Product by comparing to ICESat-2 LiDAR altimeter data. Results show that across 204 near-contemporaneous water level points for 110 lakes, the average deviation between SWOT and ICESat-2 was 0.03 m, with a root mean square deviation of 1.43 m, showing a good agreement. The higher temporal resolution of SWOT (<21 days over Greenland) enabled better monitoring of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs), with a 100% increase in the number of GLOFs detected compared to ICESat-2 between 2023 and 2024. These advantages make SWOT an excellent data source for monitoring ice-marginal lakes around the Greenland Ice Sheet.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2026 The Authors. Except as otherwise noted, this author-accepted version of a journal article published in Geophysical Research Letters is made available via the University of Sheffield Research Publications and Copyright Policy under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ © 2026. The Author(s).This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. |
| Dates: |
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| Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
| Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > School of Geography and Planning |
| Date Deposited: | 24 Feb 2026 09:47 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Mar 2026 15:30 |
| Status: | Published |
| Publisher: | Wiley / American Geophysical Union |
| Refereed: | Yes |
| Identification Number: | 10.1029/2025GL120513 |
| Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:238281 |
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Licence: CC-BY 4.0

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