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. Surface melting is a major component of the Greenland icesheet surface mass balance, and it affects sea level rise through direct runoffand the modulation of ice dynamics and hydrological processes,supraglacially, englacially and subglacially. Passive microwave (PMW)brightness temperature observations are of paramount importance in studyingthe spatial and temporal evolution of surface melting due to their longtemporal coverage (1979–present) and high temporal resolution (daily).However, a major limitation of PMW datasets has been the relatively coarsespatial resolution, which has historically been of the order of tens of kilometers.Here, we use a newly released PMW dataset (37 GHz, horizontal polarization)made available through a NASA “Making Earth System Data Records for Use inResearch Environments” (MeASUREs) program to study the spatiotemporalevolution of surface melting over the Greenland ice sheet at an enhancedspatial resolution of 3.125 km. We assess the outputs of different detectionalgorithms using data collected by automatic weather stations (AWSs) andthe outputs of the Modèle Atmosphérique Régional (MAR) regional climate model. We found that sporadicmelting is well captured using a dynamic algorithm based on the outputs ofthe Microwave Emission Model of Layered Snowpack (MEMLS), whereas a fixedthreshold of 245 K is capable of detecting persistent melt. Our resultsindicate that, during the reference period from 1979 to 2019 (from 1988 to 2019),surface melting over the ice sheet increased in terms of both duration, upto 4.5 (2.9) d per decade, and extension, up to 6.9 % (3.6 %) of theentire ice sheet surface extent per decade, according to the MEMLSalgorithm. Furthermore, the melting season started up to 4.0 (2.5) dearlier and ended 7.0 (3.9) d later per decade. We also explored theinformation content of the enhanced-resolution dataset with respect to theone at 25 km and MAR outputs using a semi-variogram approach. We foundthat the enhanced product is more sensitive to local-scale processes, therebyconfirming the potential of this new enhanced product for monitoring surfacemelting over Greenland at a higher spatial resolution than the historicalproducts and for monitoring its impact on sea level rise. This offers theopportunity to improve our understanding of the processes driving melting,to validate modeled melt extent at high resolution and, potentially, toassimilate these data in climate models.

Surface melting over the Greenland ice sheet derived from enhanced resolution passive microwave brightness temperatures (1979–2019)