Abstract
Precipitation change over Greenland or Antarctica might have truly global environmental impact because it can affect, directly or through perturbation of the ice flow dynamics, the balance of water between the ocean and the ice sheets, and therefore the global sea level. General Circulation Models (GCMs) of the atmosphere are very popular, and in principle quite appropriate, tools to study the components of a climate change and its consequences, including regional precipitation. They are not altogether successful though, even for reproducing current climate features, and this is particularly true in the polar regions. Models spatial resolution is one important limitation of models performances, particularly at regional scales. We show here how going from rather coarse to very fine resolution, by nowadays standards and considering available computer resources, helps improve the simulation of net annual mean accumulation (precipitation minus evaporation!sublimation) at the surface of Greenland and Antarctica in the Météo-France Arpège GCM. Numerous measurements of accumulation (but few for precipitation) over the two ice sheets exist to check model results, although one may wonder if these observations are all appropriately reliable and if all features of published climatologies are consistently true. On the other hand, ice core analyses bring probably very credible data on accumulation changes over Greenland and Antarctica in the past. Indeed, the agreement is remarkable between accumulation changes over the last glacial-interglacial cycle determined using several fully independent approaches. Such reliable paleoclimate data are essential to check if GCM s used to tentatively predict future climate changes are any good at reproducing observed ones in the past.
Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Géophysique de l’Environnement
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Genthon, C., Jouzel, J., Déqué, M. (1994). Accumulation at the Surface of Polar Ice Sheets: Observation and Modelling for Global Climate Change. In: Desbois, M., Désalmand, F. (eds) Global Precipitations and Climate Change. NATO ASI Series, vol 26. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-79268-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-79268-7_3
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