1500-2100 A.D. forcing impacts on the water balance in polar regions

• Main Authors: F. Lehner, C. C. Raible, T. F. Stocker, D. Hofer
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic; Climate change
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.671.5369; http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/egu2009/egu2009-5491.pdf

Despite the scientifically consistent picture of climate change, a comprehensive understanding of the hydrological cycle, which is of fundamental importance for the climate system, is still missing – especially in polar regions (White et al., 2007). Within this cycle, river freshwater discharge into the ocean is a crucial element for ocean currents. Peterson et al. (2002) observed an increase of Arctic river runoff throughout the 20th century, while Wu et al. (2005) projected this trend to continue in the first half of the 21th century. Furthermore, the freshwater transport to high latitudes increases stronger on the Northern Hemisphere than on the Southern Hemisphere indicating a possible change in the distribution of major water masses (Stocker and Raible, 2005). To assess changes of the hydrological cycle in polar regions we use a series of simulations with the Community Climate System Model version 3 (CCSM3) from NCAR. Starting from different initial conditions an ensemble of