Mapping the frost susceptibility of the ground from thaw-season InSAR surface displacements and extrapolated active layer thicknesses, Ilulissat, West-Greenland

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) images (L1 Single Look Complex data from ESA/Copernicus Sentinel-1) were acquired between May and September during the thawing seasons from 2015 to 2019, over the area of Ilulissat, West Greenland. Rasters of thaw-season ground surface displacements were obtained from the interferometric processing of the SAR scenes. The 2015-2019 average seasonal displacement (S) and long-term deformation rate (R) were derived by least-squares inversion from the surface displacement rasters. In addition, active layer thicknesses (ALT) probed in Ilulissat at the end of the summers of 2020 and 2021 were extrapolated using a vegetation map derived from a Random Forest classification of multi-temporal Sentinel-2 optical images. The average seasonal displacement and extrapolated ALT were finally used to estimate the amount of ice present in the active layer, indicating the frost susceptibility of the ground.

This dataset first contains the yearly thaw-season surface displacement rasters in the radar line-of-sight (LOS) direction, and the derived average seasonal and long-term deformation rasters. Secondly, the ALT measurements and floristic data used as inputs and validation in the study are provided along with the land cover classification, extrapolated ALT and frost susceptibility index rasters.