Journal
CRYOSPHERE
Volume 14, Issue 9, Pages 3071-3096Publisher
COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH
DOI: 10.5194/tc-14-3071-2020
Keywords
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Funding
- programme of the Netherlands Earth System Science Centre (NESSC) - Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) [024.002.001]
- National Center for Atmospheric Research - National Science Foundation [1852977]
- US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Regional and Global Model Analysis (RGMA) component of the Earth and Environmental System Modeling (EESM) programme (HiLAT-RASM project)
- DOE Office of Science (Biological and Environmental Research) Early Career Research programme
- iceMOD project - Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen)
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI [JP16H02224, JP17H06104]
- Arctic Challenge for Sustainability (ArCS) project of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) [JPMXD1300000000]
- Bundesministerium fur Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) [PalMod-1.1, PalMod-1.3]
- New Zealand Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment [RTVU1705]
- Helmholtz Climate Initiative REKLIM (Regional Climate Change)
- DKRZ HPC system Mistral [ab1073]
- National Centre for Atmospheric Science - UK National Environment Research Council
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory Research Technology and Development programme
- NASA programme Cryosphere Sciences
- NASA programme Sea Level Change Team
- and Modeling, Analysis, and Prediction
- National Science Foundation's ARCSS programme [1504230]
- NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship programme [80NSSC17K0409]
- NSF
- New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment (MBIE) [RTVU1705] Funding Source: New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment (MBIE)
- Directorate For Geosciences
- Office of Polar Programs (OPP) [1504230] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- NERC [cpom30001, ncas10014] Funding Source: UKRI
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The Greenland ice sheet is one of the largest contributors to global mean sea-level rise today and is expected to continue to lose mass as the Arctic continues to warm. The two predominant mass loss mechanisms are increased surface meltwater run-off and mass loss associated with the retreat of marine-terminating outlet glaciers. In this paper we use a large ensemble of Greenland ice sheet models forced by output from a representative subset of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) global climate models to project ice sheet changes and sea-level rise contributions over the 21st century. The simulations are part of the Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project for CMIP6 (ISMIP6). We estimate the sea-level contribution together with uncertainties due to future climate forcing, ice sheet model formulations and ocean forcing for the two greenhouse gas concentration scenarios RCP8.5 and RCP2.6. The results indicate that the Greenland ice sheet will continue to lose mass in both scenarios until 2100, with contributions of 90 +/- 50 and 32 +/- 17mm to sea-level rise for RCP8.5 and RCP2.6, respectively. The largest mass loss is expected from the south-west of Greenland, which is governed by surface mass balance changes, continuing what is already observed today. Because the contributions are calculated against an unforced control experiment, these numbers do not include any committed mass loss, i.e. mass loss that would occur over the coming century if the climate forcing remained constant. Under RCP8.5 forcing, ice sheet model uncertainty explains an ensemble spread of 40 mm, while climate model uncertainty and ocean forcing uncertainty account for a spread of 36 and 19 mm, respectively. Apart from those formally derived uncertainty ranges, the largest gap in our knowledge is about the physical understanding and implementation of the calving process, i.e. the interaction of the ice sheet with the ocean.
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