Direct measurements of ice sheet meltwater runoff in Inglefield Land, northwest Greenland
Abstract
Climate model simulations suggest that meltwater runoff is responsible for up to two-thirds of the Greenland Ice Sheet's modern contribution to global sea level rise. Despite its importance, direct measurements and validation datasets of ice sheet meltwater runoff are rare - particularly outside of southwest Greenland. To that end, we recently established in situ hydro-meteorological instrument installations for the Minturn Elv River in Inglefield Land, northwest Greenland. The installations deploy novel, ruggedized, non-contact water-level sensors that we validate using traditional pressure-transducer hardware. The water-level record is telemetered and transformed into a hourly streamflow data series using in situ hydroacoustic surveys. To our knowledge, this is the northernmost coupled hydrological and meteorological river gauging station in Greenland. It is uniquely situated in a catchment where all meltwater drains directly off the icesheet surface with no subglacial routing, thus enabling direct comparison with climatology forced regional climate model simulations. Here, we introduce this new hydro-meteorological station, validate experimental water-level monitoring technologies, present initial results, and discuss forthcoming scientific applications.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.C13C1331P
- Keywords:
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- 0720 Glaciers;
- CRYOSPHERE;
- 0726 Ice sheets;
- CRYOSPHERE;
- 0730 Ice streams;
- CRYOSPHERE;
- 0776 Glaciology;
- CRYOSPHERE