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Ocean change around Greenland under a warming climate

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Abstract

The impact of climate warming on the ocean near Greenland is investigated with a high resolution coupled global climate model. The ocean around Greenland exhibits a strong warming in response to a four times increase of present-day atmospheric \(CO_2\) levels. The signal is intensified in the intermediate layer and regionally strongest in the Greenland Sea. The projected changes in temperature are driven by changes affecting the large-scale ocean circulation rather than changes of the local atmospheric heat forcing. The ocean conditions examined here provide a background for the water masses in contact with the outlet glaciers around the Greenland coast. The future warming of the warm subtropical-origin layer could thus lead to enhanced ice sheet melting, although the signal could be mitigated by other effects, including an enhanced stratification of the surface fresh layer. Applying a simple parameterization to estimate the change in melt rate along the Greenland coast, we find that ice sheet melting increases everywhere in response to the change in water mass properties, although the melt rate changes show large variations in space. The largest melting acceleration is found on the east coast between Fram Strait and Denmark Strait, where both the parameterization applied to present-day conditions and observations suggest moderate melting up to now. These model results caution that the Greenland Ice Sheet mass balance should be monitored everywhere and not only where melting occurs at the moment.

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Acknowledgments

This study was funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). Yves Plancherel acknowledges funding from the UK Geotraces project. The coupled climate model was developed from the Met Office Hadley Centre Model by the UK High-Resolution Modelling (HiGEM) Project and the UK Japan Climate Collaboration (UJCC). HiGEM is supported by a NERC High Resolution Climate Modelling Grant (R8/H12/123). UJCC was supported by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Global Opportunities Fund, and jointly funded by NERC and the DECC/Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Program (GA01101). The model integrations were performed using the Japanese Earth Simulator supercomputer, supported by JAMSTEC. The work of Pier Luigi Vidale and Malcolm Roberts in leading the effort in Japan is particularly valued. We are also grateful to Prof David Stevens for making the model data available.

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  1. Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Camille Lique, Helen L. Johnson, Yves Plancherel & Robert Flanders

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  1. Camille Lique
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Correspondence to Camille Lique.

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Lique, C., Johnson, H.L., Plancherel, Y. et al. Ocean change around Greenland under a warming climate. Clim Dyn 45, 1235–1252 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-014-2373-4

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