Antarctic basal ice shelf melting may enhance Southern Ocean heat uptake under global warming through subpolar gyre acceleration

• Main Authors: Anders Levermann, Tore Hattermann
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antarctic; Ross Sea; Southern Ocean; Weddell; Antarc*; Antarctica; Ice Shelf
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.521.9179; http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~anders/publications/ShelfMeltingHeatUptake.pdf

Employing a simple parameterization for basal ice shelf melt-ing around Antarctica, a time-varying freshwater flux is applied to the subsurface in a global coupled climate model. Melting rates produced by the model in equilibrium under pre-industrial bound-ary conditions compare well with higher resolution regional models. Under global warming basal melting increases significantly. The re-sulting subsurface freshwater flux strengthens the gyre circulation in Weddell and Ross Sea through enhancing the density difference between the gyre’s center and the freshening coast. Thereby near surface northward transport of cold water masses is increased and oceanic heat uptake is enhanced. 1.