Six Decades of Glacial Mass Loss in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago

Six Decades of Glacial Mass Loss in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago

Noël, Brice P.Y. (Universiteit Utrecht)
Jan Van De Berg, Willem (Universiteit Utrecht)
Lhermitte, S.L.M. (TU Delft Mathematical Geodesy and Positioning)
Wouters, Bert (Universiteit Utrecht)
Schaffer, Nicole (University of Ottawa; Universidad de La Serena)
van den Broeke, Michiel R. (Universiteit Utrecht)

2018

The Canadian Arctic Archipelago comprises multiple small glaciers and ice caps, mostly concentrated on Ellesmere and Baffin Islands in the northern (NCAA, Northern Canadian Arctic Archipelago) and southern parts (SCAA, Southern Canadian Arctic Archipelago) of the archipelago, respectively. Because
these glaciers are small and show complex geometries, current regional climate models, using 5- to 20-km horizontal resolution, do not properly resolve surface mass balance patterns. Here we present a 58-year (1958–2015) reconstruction of daily surface mass balance of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, statistically
downscaled to 1 km from the output of the regional climate model RACMO2.3 at 11 km. By correcting for biases in elevation and ice albedo, the downscaling method significantly improves runoff estimates over narrow outlet glaciers and isolated ice fields. Since the last two decades, NCAA and SCAA glaciers
have experienced warmer conditions (+1.1 ∘ C) resulting in continued mass loss of 28.2±11.5 and 22.0±4.5 Gt/year, respectively, more than doubling (11.9 Gt/year) and doubling (11.9 Gt/year) the pre-1996 average. While the interior of NCAA ice caps can still buffer most of the additional melt, the lack
of a perennial firn area over low-lying SCAA glaciers has caused uninterrupted mass loss since the 1980s. In the absence of significant refreezing capacity, this indicates inevitable disappearance of these highly sensitive glaciers.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:b382cf1a-d45e-47c2-83d9-d463c58ca77c

https://doi.org/10.1029/2017JF004304

0148-0227

Journal of Geophysical Research, 123 (6), 1430-1449

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2018 Brice P.Y. Noël, Willem Jan Van De Berg, S.L.M. Lhermitte, Bert Wouters, Nicole Schaffer, Michiel R. van den Broeke