How will the Greenland Ice Sheet develop under Extreme Melt Events?

Abstract

<pre class="moz-quote-pre">In the past years, Greenland has been affected by several extreme melt events, particularly in the years 2010, 2012 and most recently, during this year's spring/summer. With progressing climate change, extreme melt events can be expected to occur more frequently and become more severe/persistent. So far, however, longer-term projections of ice loss from Greenland typically rely on scenarios that only take account of gradual changes in the climate, for instance, based on the Representative Concentration Pathways. Extreme melt events have generally been underestimated and their potential effect on future surface mass balance shows already serve impacts for sea-level rise. <br /> Here we investigate the total impact of future extreme melt events on the Greenland Ice Sheet. We force the thermodynamically coupled parallel ice sheet model PISM with idealized surface-mass-balance scenarios that include extreme melt events. Thereby, we investigate the dynamical response of the ice sheet model to changes in frequency and intensity of extreme melt events and quantify their impacts with respect to sea-level rise. </pre> <p> </p>