Bai, 2009: Greenland
ice sheet surface air temperature variability: 1840 - 2007, J. Climate, 22 (14), 4029 - 4049, doi: 10.1175 / 2009jcli2816.1.
Jason Box is one of the most prominent scientists working on Greenland and he has a recent paper reconstructing Greenland temperatures for the period 1840 - 2007 (Box, Jason E., Lei Yang, David H. Bromwich, Le - Sheng Bai, 2009: Greenland
Ice Sheet Surface Air Temperature Variability: 1840 — 2007.
Not exact matches
When the team looked at the overall balance between the radiation upward from the
surface of the
ice sheet and the radiation both upward and downward from the upper levels of the atmosphere across all infrared wavelengths over the course of a year, they found that in central Antarctica the
surface and lower atmosphere, against expectation, actually lose more energy to space if the
air contains greenhouse gases, the researchers report online and in a forthcoming Geophysical Research Letters.
The two main forces that conspire to destroy Earth's massive polar
ice sheets are heat, which melts their
surfaces via sunlight and warm
air, and gravity, which drives glaciers to slide to the sea.
And on July 11 - 12 last year, gusts of warm
air caused melting on virtually the entire
surface of the
ice sheet.
Other factors would include: — albedo shifts (both from
ice > water, and from increased biological activity, and from edge melt revealing more land, and from more old dust coming to the
surface...); — direct effect of CO2 on
ice (the former weakens the latter); — increasing, and increasingly warm, rain fall on
ice; — «stuck» weather systems bringing more and more warm tropical
air ever further toward the poles; — melting of sea
ice shelf increasing mobility of glaciers; — sea water getting under parts of the
ice sheets where the base is below sea level; — melt water lubricating the
ice sheet base; — changes in ocean currents -LRB-?)
An apparent lag in temperature seen in the Greenland
ice cores might be an artifact of the proximity of the large Laurentide Ice Sheet, which would have limited the near surface air temperature to the freezing point, as happens over summer sea - ice n
ice cores might be an artifact of the proximity of the large Laurentide
Ice Sheet, which would have limited the near surface air temperature to the freezing point, as happens over summer sea - ice n
Ice Sheet, which would have limited the near
surface air temperature to the freezing point, as happens over summer sea -
ice n
ice now.
''... the world today is on the verge of a level of global warming for which the equilibrium
surface air temperature response on the
ice sheets will exceed the global mean temperature increase by much more than a factor of two.»
If these plumes of warm
air operated in the same way during the last glaciation as they do know then they would make short work of
ice sheets that were hanging around because of the albedo effect, this is possible because not all the northern hemisphere mid latitude land
surface was covered with
ice throughout the period of glaciation and might explain why glaciations terminate quickly
Icebergs much larger than this have broken off the Antarctic Peninsula, and there is good evidence that warming of the
surface air temperature is responsible for at least some of these (though warmer water temperatures, and simply the internal dynamics of
ice sheets also play a role).
The average
surface air temperature for the year ending September 2017 is the 2nd warmest since 1900; however, cooler spring and summer temperatures contributed to a rebound in snow cover in the Eurasian Arctic, slower summer sea
ice loss, and below - average melt extent for the Greenland
ice sheet.
These OMITTED / POORLY Represented processes include the following: oceanic eddies, tides, fronts, buoyancy - driven coastal and boundary currents, cold halocline, dense water plumes and convection, double diffusion,
surface / bottom mixed layer, sea
ice — thickness distribution, concentration, deformation, drift and export, fast
ice, snow cover, melt ponds and
surface albedo, atmospheric loading, clouds and fronts,
ice sheets / caps and mountain glaciers, permafrost, river runoff, and
air — sea
ice — land interactions and coupling.
The icePod system will consist of a suite of imaging sensors mounted in an external pod carried on New York
Air National Guard LC - 130's to map the
surface and subsurface
ice topography of
ice sheets,
ice streams and outlet glaciers.