Processes Controlling the Surface Mass Balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet for Improving Mass Balance Estimates: Outcomes from a Community Workshop
Abstract
Despite the progress in physics parameterizations in regional climate models, the increasing computational power and the increasing volume of airborne and in-situ datasets collected over Greenland, there are still many challenges that limit our capability to estimate current and project future surface mass balance (SMB) with the degree of accuracy needed to accurately constrain sea level rise. A NASA-sponsored workshop focusing on understanding of the processes controlling the surface mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet for improving mass balance estimates was held at the beginning of September 2016 at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. The workshop was first advocated during the discussion at the 2015 PARCA meeting as a crucial tool to answer questions such as: How do we separate the uncertainties deriving from the physics of the models and their forcing on SMB estimates? How do we scale estimates of runoff to a larger scale? How do we interpret elevation-change data and improve mass balance-change estimates by accounting for densification and compaction processes? What is the spatial and temporal variability of uncertainties of the quantities driving SMB? The ultimate goal of the workshop was recommending a series of programmatic and scientific actions that will ultimately lead to improved GrIS SMB estimates in a timely manner. In this talk, we, the organizing committee, report and discuss the outcomes of the workshop. We will first discuss the structure and format of the workshop, the activities carried out to gather community feedback and the list of recommendations and priorities identified during the workshop. This presentation will also be used to continue gathering feedback from the community through the shared live document that will be generated at the end of the workshop but that will still be open during AGU for those colleagues who did not participate to the workshop to provide their feedback. The outcome of the workshop will benefit not only the members of the scientific community focusing on SMB over the GrIS but also the participants of the PARCA 2017 meeting as well as program officers at funding agencies.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFM.C54A..08T
- Keywords:
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- 0762 Mass balance 0764 Energy balance;
- CRYOSPHEREDE: 0794 Instruments and techniques;
- CRYOSPHEREDE: 0798 Modeling;
- CRYOSPHERE