Improved representation of East Antarctic surface mass balance in a regional atmospheric climate model
By J. M. Wessem, C. Reijmer, Mathieu Morlighem, Jeremie Mouginot, Eric J. M. Rignot, B. Medley, Ian R. Joughin, Bert Wouters, M. Depoorter, Jonathan L. Bamber and 4 more. 2014
272 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This study evaluates the impact of a recent upgrade in the physics package of the regional atmospheric climate model RACMO2 on the simulated surface mass balance (SMB) of the Antarctic ice sheet. The modelled SMB increases, in particular over the grounded ice sheet of East Antarctica (+44Gt a-1), with a small change in West Antarctica. This mainly results from an increase in precipitation, which is explained by changes in the cloud microphysics, including a new parameterization for ice cloud supersaturation, and changes in large-scale circulation patterns, which alter topographically forced precipitation. The spatial changes in SMB are evaluated using 3234 in situ SMB observations and ice-balance velocities, and the temporal variability using GRACE satellite retrievals. The in situ observations and balance velocities show a clear improvement of the spatial representation of the SMB in the interior of East Antarctica, which has become considerably wetter. No improvements are seen for West Antarctica and the coastal regions. A comparison of model SMB temporal variability with GRACE satellite retrievals shows no significant change in performance.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1a48278d56fa260bdb4e7217f6e3addd16f7aed0
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In Atmospheric Science
- Eric J. M. Rignot
- Jeremie Mouginot
- Isabella Velicogna
- Bernd Scheuchl
- F. Landerer
- David Wiese
- Tyler Clark Sutterley
- John M. Wahr
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Continuity of Ice Sheet Mass Loss in Greenland and Antarctica From the GRACE and GRACE Follow‐On Missions (2020, background): “3p2 for West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula (van Wessem et al., 2018; Van Wessem et al., 2014), and RACMO2.”
- Continent‐Wide, Interferometric SAR Phase, Mapping of Antarctic Ice Velocity (2019, result): “A comparison of Regional Atmospheric Climate MOdel (RACMO) Version 2.3p1 and Version 2.1, for instance, indicated major improvements with Version 2.3p1 (van Wessem et al., 2014).”