Glacier weather vs glacier climate: At what scale do we need to parameterize calving?
Abstract
Iceberg calving is an important mechanism of mass loss for ice sheets and glaciers, and accounts for ~50% of mass loss from Greenland. However, modeling of calving processes remains a major challenge largely due to the complex interactions that take place at a glacier's terminus and the wide range of scales at which calving occurs. The position of the calving face represents the balance between processes that advect ice to the terminus (processes that control ice velocity) and those that remove it from the front (iceberg calving and submarine melting). The relative importance of each of these terms varies over a wide range of temporal and spatial scales. As such, parameterizing calving in numerical models is largely impacted by the chosen scale. Here we attempt to differentiate between the inherently stochastic nature of calving ("glacier weather"), and calving that reflects large-scale dynamics ("glacier climate"). We use time series of ice velocity, terminus position, and calving rate from glaciers around Greenland to characterize these different behaviors.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.C32A..01S
- Keywords:
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- 0758 Remote sensing;
- CRYOSPHERE;
- 0774 Dynamics;
- CRYOSPHERE;
- 0798 Modeling;
- CRYOSPHERE