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• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic; Greenland; Ice; Ice Sheet; permafrost; Sea ice
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.476.9287; http://rdgs.dk/djg/pdfs/106/1/04.pdf

Understanding Greenland climate is important as climate models predict high-latitude amplification of the en-hanced greenhouse effect and that climate changes in the most recent decade in Greenland are unprecedented in historical times (Box, 2002). It has been suggested that the decade of the 1990s is probably the warmest in the past 1000 years on a global scale (Crowley, 2000). Factors such as sea ice, snow cover and permafrost are all suscep-tible to variations in sunlight, precipitation, air / surface temperature and ocean heat transport. Consequently inter-actions between the atmosphere, ice, snow, land and ocean in the arctic and the feedback processes associated with these interactions, makes the Arctic a complex and highly vulnerable environment. Climate fluctuations in the Arctic influence global ice masses and, in turn, the pelagic productivity and food webs (Hansen et al., 2003). In West Greenland, local dimensions of climate changes have been seen in relation to the lack of cod and corre-sponding transition from a cod-fishing to a shrimp-fishing economy in 1960-1990 (Hamilton et al., 2003). A recent study (Wieland, 2004) suggests a revert situation with de-creasing numbers of shrimps since 1990 due to an in-crease in bottom sea water temperatures in 1991-2002. The Greenland climate is to a large extent controlled by the single ice sheet covering most of the land surface and cold and warm wind systems coming from North-west/North and South. Due to the size of Greenland, there exist large North- South contrasts in solar net radiation and temperature at any time of year. Thus, any absolute values of climate parameters may be extreme site-specific in contrast to trends. Changes and trends in air tempera-tures around Greenland have been analysed previously.