A 21st Century Warming Threshold for Sustained Greenland Ice Sheet Mass Loss

Global Warming and the Greenland Ice Sheet

The Greenland coastal temperatures have followed the early 20th century global warming trend. Since 1940, however, the Greenland coastal stations data have undergone predominantly a cooling trend. At the summit of the Greenland ice sheet the summer average temperature has decreased at the rate of 2.2 ◦C per decade since the beginning of the measurements in 1987. This suggests that the Greenland...

Revisiting Greenland ice sheet mass loss observed by GRACE

[1] In this paper we discuss a new method for determining mass time series for 16 hydrological basins representing the Greenland system (GS) whereby we rely on Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission data. In the same analysis we also considered observed mass changes over Ellesmere Island, Baffin Island, Iceland, and Svalbard (EBIS). The summed contribution of the complete syste...

21st century projections of surface mass balance changes for major drainage systems of the Greenland ice sheet

Outputs from the regional climate model Modèle Atmosphérique Régionale at a spatial resolution of 25 km are used to study 21st century projected surface mass balance (SMB) over six major drainage basins of the Greenland ice sheet (GrIS). The regional model is forced with the outputs of three different Earth System Models (CanESM2, NorESM1 and MIROC5) obtained when considering two greenhouse gas...

Estimation of the Greenland ice sheet surface mass balance during 20th and 21st centuries

Mass Balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet at High Elevations.

Comparison of ice discharge from higher elevation areas of the entire Greenland Ice Sheet with total snow accumulation gives estimates of ice thickening rates over the past few decades. On average, the region has been in balance, but with thickening of 21 centimeters per year in the southwest and thinning of 30 centimeters per year in the southeast. The north of the ice sheet shows less variabi...