Modeling the Greenland ice sheet response to climate change on different timescales
Final Report Abstract
The Greenland ice sheet could potentially contribute up to 7 m to sea level rise in the coming millennia due to anthropogenic global warming and it was shown that if the global Earth’s temperature will exceed a certain threshold value, the Greenland ice sheet will eventually melt completely. However, the magnitude of global warming which will lead to crossing this threshold is not well known. The sensitivity of the ice sheet to climate change on long timescales will largely depend on surface mass balance change. In this project we developed a novel and computationally efficient approach for modeling the surface mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet by using a regional climate model of intermediate complexity. This model can be used for long-term simulations of the Greenland ice sheet under different climate change scenarios and thus contribute to improvement of the projections of the Greenland Ice Sheet contribution to future sea level rise as well as to the assessment of the probability of irreversible changes in the Earth system.
Publications
- AGU Fall Meeting 2013. Simulating the surface energy and mass balance of Greenland with an intermediate complexity approach
Andrey Ganopolski
- EGU General Assembly 2013. A snowpack model to improve ice-sheet melting on millennial time scales
Andrey Ganopolski
- EGU General Assembly 2014. Evaluating the performance of the REMBOv2 over Greenland for present-day and future scenarios
Andrey Ganopolski
- SEMIC: an efficient surface energy and mass balance model applied to the Greenland ice sheet. The Cryosphere, 11, 1519–1535, 2017
Krapp, M., A. Robinson, A. Ganopolski
(See online at https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-1519-2017)