Discrepancies between observations and climate models of large-scale wind-driven Greenland melt influence sea-level rise projections.
other
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 36376292.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-022-34414-2 and PMC identifier 9663692.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
While climate models project that Greenland ice sheet (GrIS) melt will continue to accelerate with climate change, models exhibit limitations in capturing observed connections between GrIS melt and changes in high-latitude atmospheric circulation. Here we impose observed Arctic winds in a fully-coupled climate model with fixed anthropogenic forcing to quantify the influence of the rotational component of large-scale atmospheric circulation variability over the Arctic on the temperature field and the surface mass/energy balances through adiabatic processes. We show that recent changes involving mid-to-upper-tropospheric anticyclonic wind anomalies - linked with tropical forcing - explain half of the observed Greenland surface warming and ice loss acceleration since 1990, suggesting a pathway for large-scale winds to potentially enhance sea-level rise by ~0.2 mm/year per decade. We further reveal fingerprints of this observed teleconnection in paleo-reanalyses spanning the past 400 years, which heightens concern about model limitations to capture wind-driven adiabatic processes associated with GrIS melt.