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Twenty-first century ocean forcing of the Greenland ice sheet for modelling of sea level contribution

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Date
16/03/2020
Author
Slater, Donald A.
Felikson, Denis
Straneo, Fiamma
Goelzer, Heiko
Little, Christopher M.
Morlighem, Mathieu
Fettweis, Xavier
Nowicki, Sophie
Keywords
GC Oceanography
GE Environmental Sciences
Water Science and Technology
Earth-Surface Processes
DAS
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Abstract
Changes in ocean temperature and salinity are expected to be an important determinant of the Greenland ice sheet's future sea level contribution. Yet, simulating the impact of these changes in continental-scale ice sheet models remains challenging due to the small scale of key physics, such as fjord circulation and plume dynamics, and poor understanding of critical processes, such as calving and submarine melting. Here we present the ocean forcing strategy for Greenland ice sheet models taking part in the Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project for CMIP6 (ISMIP6), the primary community effort to provide 21st century sea level projections for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report. Beginning from global atmosphere-ocean general circulation models, we describe two complementary approaches to provide ocean boundary conditions for Greenland ice sheet models, termed the "retreat" and "submarine melt" implementations. The retreat implementation parameterises glacier retreat as a function of projected subglacial discharge and ocean thermal forcing, is designed to be implementable by all ice sheet models and results in retreat of around 1 and 15 km by 2100 in RCP2.6 and 8.5 scenarios, respectively. The submarine melt implementation provides estimated submarine melting only, leaving the ice sheet model to solve for the resulting calving and glacier retreat and suggests submarine melt rates will change little under RCP2.6 but will approximately triple by 2100 under RCP8.5. Both implementations have necessarily made use of simplifying assumptions and poorly constrained parameterisations and, as such, further research on submarine melting, calving and fjord-shelf exchange should remain a priority. Nevertheless, the presented framework will allow an ensemble of Greenland ice sheet models to be systematically and consistently forced by the ocean for the first time and should result in a significant improvement in projections of the Greenland ice sheet's contribution to future sea level change.
Citation
Slater , D A , Felikson , D , Straneo , F , Goelzer , H , Little , C M , Morlighem , M , Fettweis , X & Nowicki , S 2020 , ' Twenty-first century ocean forcing of the Greenland ice sheet for modelling of sea level contribution ' , Cryosphere , vol. 14 , no. 3 , pp. 985-1008 . https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-14-985-2020
Publication
Cryosphere
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-14-985-2020
ISSN
1994-0416
Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Description
This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Office of Polar Programs (grant no. 1916566), the National Science Foundation, Division of Ocean Sciences (grant no. 1756272), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (grant no. NNX17AI03G), the National Science Foundation, Office of Polar Programs (grant nos. 1513396 and 1504230), the Netherlands Earth System Science Centre (grant no. 024.002.001), the Fonds De La Recherche Scientifique – FNRS (grant no. 2.5020.11), and the FédérationWallonie-Bruxelles (grant no. 1117545).
Collections
  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/19751

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