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Impact of climate sensitivity and polar amplification on projections of Greenland Ice Sheet loss

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Abstract

The future rate of Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) deglaciation and the future contribution of GrIS deglaciation to sea level rise will depend critically on the magnitude of northern hemispheric polar amplification and global equilibrium climate sensitivity. Here, these relationships are analyzed using an ensemble of multi-century coupled ice-sheet/climate model simulations seeded with observationally-constrained initial conditions and then integrated forward under tripled preindustrial CO2. Polar amplifications and climate sensitivities were varied between ensemble members in order to bracket current uncertainty in polar amplification and climate sensitivity. A large inter-ensemble spread in mean GrIS air temperature, albedo and surface mass balance trends stemming from this uncertainty resulted in GrIS ice volume loss ranging from 5 to 40 % of the original ice volume after 500 years. The large dependence of GrIS deglaciation on polar amplification and climate sensitivity that we find indicates that the representation of these processes in climate models will exert a strong control on any simulated predictions of multi-century GrIS evolution. Efforts to reduce polar amplification and equilibrium climate sensitivity uncertainty will therefore play a critical role in constraining projections of GrIS deglaciation and sea level rise in a future high-CO2 world.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a Victoria University of Wellington Doctoral Scholarship to J. Fyke and the New Zealand government ANZICE program. He is currently supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. The research was further enabled through use of computing resources provided by WestGrid and Compute/Calcul Canada. We wish to thank two anonymous reviewers and Lionel Carter and Ed Wiebe for greatly improving the quality of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Los Alamos National Laboratory, MS B216, Los Alamos, NM, 87545, USA

    Jeremy Fyke, Michael Eby & Andrew Weaver

  2. Antarctic Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Andrew Mackintosh

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  1. Jeremy Fyke
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  2. Michael Eby
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  3. Andrew Mackintosh
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  4. Andrew Weaver
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Correspondence to Jeremy Fyke.

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Fyke, J., Eby, M., Mackintosh, A. et al. Impact of climate sensitivity and polar amplification on projections of Greenland Ice Sheet loss. Clim Dyn 43, 2249–2260 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-014-2050-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-014-2050-7

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