Abstract
ABSTRACT Using regional climate-model runs with a horizontal resolution of 5.5 km for two future scenarios and two time slices (representative concentration pathway [RCP] 4.5 and 8.5; 2031–2050 and 2081–2100) relative to a historical period (1991–2010), we study the climate change for the Qeqqata municipality in general and for Kangerlussuaq in particular. The climate-model runs are validated against observations of temperature and surface mass balance and a reanalysis simulation with the same model setup as the scenario runs, providing high confidence in the results. Clear increases in temperature and precipitation for the end of the 21st century are shown, both on and off the ice sheet, with an off–ice sheet mean annual temperature increase of 2.5–3°C for the RCP4.5 scenario and 4.8–6.0°C for the RCP8.5 scenario, and for precipitation an increase of 20–30% for the RCP4.5 scenario and 30–80% for the RCP8.5 scenario. Climate analogs for Kangerlussuaq for temperature and precipitation are provided, indicating that end-of-the-century Kangerlussuaq mean annual temperature is comparable with temperatures for the south of Greenland today. The extent of glacial retreat is also estimated for the Qeqqata municipality, suggesting that most of the ice caps south of the Kangerlussuaq fjord will be gone before the end of this century. Furthermore, the high-resolution runs are compared with an ensemble of six models run at a 50 km resolution, showing the need for high-resolution model simulations over Greenland.
Highlights
The climate of the Arctic is in rapid transition, with Greenland and its ice sheet already seeing the impacts of rising regional temperatures, including ice loss of approximately 234 ± 20 Gt yr−1 since 2003, contributing about 0.7 mm yr−1 to the sea level (Barletta, Sørensen, and Forsberg 2013; Shepherd et al 2012)
Shown are monthly mean temperatures taken from the ERA-I run used in Langen et al (2017) and Mottram et al (2017), and we see that the EC-Earth historical downscaling has a close match to observations for monthly mean temperatures, both off and on the ice sheet, and it performs at the same level as the ERA-I downscaling
Changes in annual mean temperature for five locations are close to 1°C (10–20%) for the mid-century RCP4.5 time period and in the range 2.5–3°C (20–30%) for the end-of-century RCP4.5 scenario
Summary
The climate of the Arctic is in rapid transition, with Greenland and its ice sheet already seeing the impacts of rising regional temperatures, including ice loss of approximately 234 ± 20 Gt yr−1 since 2003, contributing about 0.7 mm yr−1 to the sea level (Barletta, Sørensen, and Forsberg 2013; Shepherd et al 2012). Climate change can have unpredictable consequences as, for example, in Greenland, where the length of the growing season is expected to increase during the 21st century, but there are indications that periods of drought will increase. Both of these processes will affect agricultural productivity, and proper technical solutions will be required to expand current crop production and livestock management, especially in regions further north in Greenland than are currently farmed. This is an issue around Kangerlussuaq and more generally in the e1420862-2
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