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Climate response to the meltwater runoff from Greenland ice sheet: evolving sensitivity to discharging locations

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Abstract

Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) might have lost a large amount of its volume during the last interglacial and may do so again in the future due to climate warming. In this study, we test whether the climate response to the glacial meltwater is sensitive to its discharging location. Two fully coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation models, CM2G and CM2M, which have completely different ocean components are employed to do the test. In each experiment, a prescribed freshwater flux of 0.1 Sv is discharged from one of the four locations around Greenland—Petermann, 79 North, Jacobshavn and Helheim glaciers. The results from both models show that the AMOC weakens more when the freshwater is discharged from the northern GIS (Petermann and 79 North) than when it is discharged from the southern GIS (Jacobshavn and Helheim), by 15% (CM2G) and 31% (CM2M) averaged over model year 50–300 (CM2G) and 70–300 (CM2M), respectively. This is due to easier access of the freshwater from northern GIS to the deepwater formation site in the Nordic Seas. In the long term (> 300 year), however, the AMOC change is nearly the same for freshwater discharged from any location of the GIS. The East Greenland current accelerates with time and eventually becomes significantly faster when the freshwater is discharged from the north than from the south. Therefore, freshwater from the north is transported efficiently towards the south first and then circulates back to the Nordic Seas, making its impact to the deepwater formation there similar to the freshwater discharged from the south. The results indicate that the details of the location of meltwater discharge matter if the short-term (< 300 years) climate response is concerned, but may not be critical if the long-term (> 300 years) climate response is focused upon.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the comments on the manuscript by Ron Stouffer and Rong Zhang, and the discussion with John Lazante, and Liping Zhang at GFDL and Kun Wang at Peking University. Y. Liu is supported by the National Key R&D Program of China 2017YFA0603801 and Chinese National Natural Science Foundation grant 41630527. OVS is supported by NOAA grant NA13OAR43100.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, School of Physics, Peking Univeristy, Chengfu Road No. 209, Haidian, Beijing, 100871, China

    Yonggang Liu

  2. NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Ocean Group, 201 Forrestal Rd., Princeton, NJ, 08540, USA

    Robert Hallberg, Bonnie L. Samuels & Matthew Harrison

  3. Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Princeton University, 201 Forrestal Road, Princeton, NJ, 08540, USA

    Olga Sergienko

  4. Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08540, USA

    Michael Oppenheimer

  5. Department of Geosciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08540, USA

    Michael Oppenheimer

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  1. Yonggang Liu
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Correspondence to Yonggang Liu.

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Liu, Y., Hallberg, R., Sergienko, O. et al. Climate response to the meltwater runoff from Greenland ice sheet: evolving sensitivity to discharging locations. Clim Dyn 51, 1733–1751 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-017-3980-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-017-3980-7

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