Simulated Greenland Surface Mass Balance in the GISS ModelE2 GCM: Role of the Ice Sheet Surface

Surface mass-balance changes of the Greenland ice sheet

Mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet over the past decade has caused the impression that the ice sheet has been behaving anomalously to the warming of the 1990s. We have reconstructed the recent (1866–2005) surface mass-balance (SMB) history of the Greenland ice sheet on a 5 5 km grid using a runoff-retention model based on the positive degree-day method. The model is forced with new datasets...

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

Microbial abundance in surface ice on the Greenland Ice Sheet

Measuring microbial abundance in glacier ice and identifying its controls is essential for a better understanding and quantification of biogeochemical processes in glacial ecosystems. However, cell enumeration of glacier ice samples is challenging due to typically low cell numbers and the presence of interfering mineral particles. We quantified for the first time the abundance of microbial cell...

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...

Probabilistic parameterisation of the surface mass balance–elevation feedback in regional climate model simulations of the Greenland ice sheet

We present a new parameterisation that relates surface mass balance (SMB: the sum of surface accumulation and surface ablation) to changes in surface elevation of the Greenland ice sheet (GrIS) for the MAR (Modèle Atmosphérique Régional: Fettweis, 2007) regional climate model. The motivation is to dynamically adjust SMB as the GrIS evolves, allowing us to force ice sheet models with SMB simulat...