Consistent evidence of increasing Antarctic accumulation with warming

Published: Aug 1, 2015 by The PISM Authors


Title	Consistent evidence of increasing Antarctic accumulation with warming
Authors	K. Frieler and others
Venue	Nature Climate Change

The Antarctic ice sheet (AIS) will likely experience higher snow accumulation rates in a warmer climate because warmer air has a higher moisture-holding capacity. This paper quantifies the effect based on ice-core data and paleo-climate simulations, which together show a consistent continental-scale accumulation increase of 5 percent per degree Kelvin. (Note ice-core data and GCM-type modelling results agree for the last deglaciation.) However, some of the mass gain of the AIS is offset by dynamical losses induced by accumulation. This is where PISM plays a supporting role in the paper. PISM results were used to generate a response function allowing projections of sea-level fall in terms of continental-scale accumulation changes. In PISM the accumulation changes can and do compete with changes in surface melting and with dynamical losses induced by mechanisms like ocean interaction and sliding.

A two-year PostDoc positions in ice sheet and Earth system modelling is available in the Ice Dynamics group, as part of the new Earth Resilience Science Unit (ERSU), at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

Two PhD fellowship positions in ice sheet modelling are advertised at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen.

The Alfred Wegener Institute, Bremerhaven, is offering a PhD position in the field of coupled ice sheet-ocean modelling. The core of the project is to run simulations with FESOM-PISM (a coupled ocean-ice shelf-ice sheet model with evolving cavity geometries) for different 21st-century climate projections to obtain well-constrained trajectories of future ice mass loss from the vast Antarctic Ice Sheet. Model results will feed into a fingerprinting method that considers the ocean response as well as gravitational effects and contributions from other sources. The final product will be a time series of global maps of regional sea-level variations that consider all of the most relevant processes.