On the State of the Canadian Arctic Glaciers in Future Climate

Glaciers are frozen fresh water reservoirs that respond to changes in temperature and snow accumulation at the surface. With an area of approximately 152,000 km2, the Canadian Arctic glaciers are among the largest of the Arctic glaciers, and their possible contribution to sea level rise is not negligible. Regional Climate Models (RCM) are an important tool to assess the projected changes to climate, particularly due to its high resolution compared with GCMs. Currently, glaciers are only represented in an extremely simplified way in the fifth generation Canadian Regional Climate Model (CRCM5). This simple approach of representing glaciers as static glacier masks is appropriate for short-term integrations, where the response of glacier to changing atmospheric conditions might still be small due to glacier response times and therefore the feedback of changing glacier extent on large-scale atmospheric flow conditions might be negligible. A new dynamic glacier scheme has been developed for use within CRCM5, based on volume-area relationships. Offline Simulations have been performed with this glacier model for the 2000-2100 period over a domain covering the glaciers of Arctic Canada. These simulations were driven by outputs from a CRCM5 transient climate change simulation, driven by MPIHR at the lateral boundaries, for RCP 4.5. This paper will present some of the preliminary results from this simulation, particularly focusing on the projected changes to the surface energy and water partitioning resulting from changes to glacier volume and area over the study domain.