Greenland’s contribution to global sea-level rise by the end of the 21st century

Graversen, Rune G., Drijfhout, Sybren, Hazeleger, Wilco, Wal, Roderik, Bintanja, Richard and Helsen, Michiel (2011) Greenland’s contribution to global sea-level rise by the end of the 21st century. Climate Dynamics, 37 (7-8), 1427-1442. (doi:10.1007/s00382-010-0918-8).

Abstract

The Greenland ice sheet holds enough water to raise the global sea level with ~7 m. Over the last few decades, observations manifest a substantial increase of the mass loss of this ice sheet. Both enhanced melting and increase of the dynamical discharge, associated with calving at the outlet-glacier fronts, are contributing to the mass imbalance. Using a dynamical and thermodynamical ice-sheet model, and taking into account speed up of outlet glaciers, we estimate Greenland’s contribution to the 21st century global sea-level rise and the uncertainty of this estimate. Boundary fields of temperature and precipitation extracted from coupled climate-model projections used for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, are applied to the icesheet model. We implement a simple parameterization for increased flow of outlet glaciers, which decreases the bias of the modeled present-day surface height. It also allows for taking into account the observed recent increase in dynamical discharge, and it can be used for future projections associated with outlet-glacier speed up. Greenland contributes 0–17 cm to global sea-level rise by the end of the 21st century. This range includes the uncertainties in climate-model projections, the uncertainty associated with scenarios of greenhouse-gas emissions, as well as the uncertainties in future outlet-glacier discharge. In addition, the range takes into account the uncertainty of the ice-sheet model and its boundary fields.

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Contributors

Author: Sybren Drijfhout

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