Melt climatology estimates for small to giant Antarctic icebergs, links to NetCDF files ...

• Main Authors: Rackow, Thomas, Wesche, Christine, Timmermann, Ralph, Hellmer, Hartmut H, Juricke, Stephan, Jung, Thomas
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: PANGAEA 2017
• Subjects: File content; File name; File format; File size; Uniform resource locator/link to file; Antarc*; Antarctic; Antarctica; Ice Shelf; Iceberg*; Southern Ocean
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.1594/pangaea.865335; https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.865335

We present four melt climatology estimates based on a simulation of Antarctic iceberg drift and melting that includes small, medium-sized, and giant tabular icebergs with a realistic size distribution. For the first time, an iceberg model is initialized with a set of nearly 7000 observed iceberg positions and sizes around Antarctica. We simulate drift and lateral melt using iceberg-draft averaged ocean currents, temperature, and salinity. A new basal melting scheme, originally applied in ice shelf melting studies, uses in situ temperature, salinity, and relative velocities at an iceberg's bottom. The climatology estimates based on simulations of small (SMA), 'small-to-medium'-sized (MED12 & MED123), and small-to-giant icebergs (ALL) exhibit differential characteristics: successive inclusion of larger icebergs leads to a reduced seasonality of the iceberg meltwater flux and a shift of the mass input to the area north of 58°S, while less meltwater is released into the coastal areas. This highlights the ... : To enable communication with users of the melt climatologies, the authors would appreciate a notification when using the data sets or when errors are found.Coverage and size of the four NetCDF datasets are as follows: the datasets cover the Southern Ocean area between 36°S and 80°S. They each comprise 360 x 45 = 16200 spatial data points per month (194400 in total). ...