Melting trends over the Greenland ice sheet (1958–2009) from spaceborne microwave data and regional climate models ...

• Main Authors: Fettweis, X., Tedesco, Marco, Van Den Broeke, M., Ettema, J.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Columbia University 2011
• Subjects: Albedo; Meltwater; Climatic geomorphology; Ice sheets > Measurement; Ice sheets; Geology; FOS: Earth and related environmental sciences; Geomorphology; Hydrology; Greenland; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.7916/d8z60p02; https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8Z60P02

To study near-surface melt changes over the Greenland ice sheet (GrIS) since 1979, melt extent estimates from two regional climate models were compared with those obtained from spaceborne microwave brightness temperatures using two different remote sensing algorithms. The results from the two models were consistent with those obtained with the remote sensing algorithms at both daily and yearly time scales, encouraging the use of the models for analyzing melting trends before the satellite era (1958–1979), when forcing data is available. Differences between satellite-derived and model-simulated results still occur and are used here to identify (i) biases in the snow models (notably in the albedo parametrization, in the thickness of a snow layer, in the maximum liquid water content within the snowpack and in the snowfall impacting the bare ice appearance in summer) and (ii) limitations in the use of passive microwave data for snowmelt detection at the edge of the ice sheet due to mixed pixel effect (e.g., ...