Linear response of east Greenland's tidewater glaciers to ocean/atmosphere warming.
Publication Date
2018-07-31Journal Title
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
ISSN
0027-8424
Publisher
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Volume
115
Issue
31
Pages
7907-7912
Language
eng
Type
Article
Physical Medium
Print-Electronic
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Cowton, T., Sole, A., Nienow, P., Slater, D., & Christoffersen, P. (2018). Linear response of east Greenland's tidewater glaciers to ocean/atmosphere warming.. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 115 (31), 7907-7912. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1801769115
Abstract
Predicting the retreat of tidewater outlet glaciers forms a major obstacle to forecasting the rate of mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet. This reflects the challenges of modeling the highly dynamic, topographically complex, and data-poor environment of the glacier-fjord systems that link the ice sheet to the ocean. To avoid these difficulties, we investigate the extent to which tidewater glacier retreat can be explained by simple variables: air temperature, meltwater runoff, ocean temperature, and two simple parameterizations of "ocean/atmosphere" forcing based on the combined influence of runoff and ocean temperature. Over a 20-y period at 10 large tidewater outlet glaciers along the east coast of Greenland, we find that ocean/atmosphere forcing can explain up to 76% of the variability in terminus position at individual glaciers and 54% of variation in terminus position across all 10 glaciers. Our findings indicate that (i) the retreat of east Greenland's tidewater glaciers is best explained as a product of both oceanic and atmospheric warming and (ii) despite the complexity of tidewater glacier behavior, over multiyear timescales a significant proportion of terminus position change can be explained as a simple function of this forcing. These findings thus demonstrate that simple parameterizations can play an important role in predicting the response of the ice sheet to future climate warming.
Sponsorship
Natural Environment Research Council (NE/K005871/1)
European Commission Horizon 2020 (H2020) ERC (3276207)
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1801769115
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/280477
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