OMG: Broad-scale ocean cooling across the continental shelf in Northwest: Does it reach Greenland's glaciers through the fjords?

NASA Mission Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) has now completed three years of both ocean and ice surveys in Greenland. The ocean surveys cover the continental shelf broadly, but also contain many direct temperature and salinity measurements in fjords and deep troughs that hold many of Greenland's marine terminating glaciers. Ocean observations from these surveys have begun to show year-to-year changes in ocean temperatures that are coherent across much of the shelf. Since 2015, ocean temperatures from Disko Bay through Melville Bay have cooled between 1 and 2°C throughout much of the water column. We will also examine ocean observations collected during the 2018 summer survey to determine whether the cool waters persisted for an additional year. We will also show changes in a number of glaciers in the northwest sector of Greenland based on the 2016, 2017 and 2018 GLISTIN radar surveys, which provide digital elevation maps near glacier fronts with 1-2 meter vertical accuracy. Based on the behavior of these glaciers, it may be possible in some cases to infer whether the cold ocean waters reached into the fjords to interact with glaciers and whether the glaciers are responding dynamically to this change in ocean forcing.