GEUS is a scientific institution dedicated to research and monitoring of earth systems in Denmark and Greenland. They play a vital role in understanding the geological history, glaciology, climate, natural resources, and geohazards in these regions.
GEUS operates over 40 automatic weather stations on the Greenland Ice Sheet for the purpose of weather and climate monitoring and to provide input data for ice sheet mass balance and research studies. This information is vital for understanding glaciological and climate processes, in addition to informing resource management and climate adaptation strategies.
The stations span from the ice sheet margin to the interior, and record some of the most extreme weather conditions on earth. They serve a critical function as input data for numerical weather prediction models in a data sparse region, providing near-real-time weather observations at hourly intervals.
Credit: Anja Rutishauser
The GEUS weather station network is very unique due to the remote location and extreme conditions at the sites, which add complexity to the logistics associated with station maintenance . In addition, the on-ice stations are considered mobile with movement due to ice flow ranging from centimeters to 100s of meters per year. Synoptic Data uses transmitted station positions to periodically update the locations of the stations for both our API service and data visualization applications.
The GEUS network consists of single-boom tripods in the ice sheet melt zone, as well as two-boom masts in the ice sheet accumulation zone. Hourly data transmission includes standard meteorological variables at hourly average and instantaneous time samples, in addition to variables such as ice temperature, surface height, radiation and derived energy balance components. At this time, Synoptic is ingesting standard variables (air temperature, relative humidity, pressure, wind speed and direction), but intends to expand ingest to additional variables in the future.
Synoptic Data is excited to collaborate with GEUS to provide an additional source of data access for this unique network, and to help support weather and climate monitoring in these regions.