Signatures of Greenland melting in the North Atlantic: Model simulations vs. Argo, GRACE, radar altimetry and ocean reanalysis

• Main Authors: Kusche, J., Stolzenberger, S., Wekerle, C., Rietbroek, R., Uebbing, B.
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: Baffin Bay; Greenland; Baffin; Davis Strait; Nordic Seas; North Atlantic; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://gfzpublic.gfz-potsdam.de/pubman/item/item_5017851

Greenland ice mass loss contributes to global mean and regional sea level rise and changes in ocean circulation. In Stolzenberger et al. (2022), we explore whether signatures found in ocean model simulations are identified in radar altimetry, satellite gravimetry and Argo float observations. We have included Greenland freshwater flux (GF) in the global Finite-Element-Sea ice-Ocean Model (FESOM) for the years 1993–2016. Experiments are performed on a low (~24 km) and high resolution (~6 km) eddy-permitting grids and simulations are compared to different variables from Argo floats, satellite observations, and reanalyses. We find that surface GF maps into signatures in temperature and salinity down to about 100 m in the surroundings of Greenland. Melting signatures are particularly visible in steric heights in Baffin Bay and Davis Strait where we find model-data fits improved by up to 30% in MSE when including GF. For the Nordic part of the Nordic Seas, however, we find no improvement when including GF. We compare steric height change with reanalyses and a new setup of the Uebbing et al. (2019) inversion utilizing GRACE and altimeter data. We cannot confirm that GF temperature and salinity signatures are visible in the Argo observations on the time scales and sampling areas considered We also show that model resolution has generally a larger influence on the results than the impact of the meltwater forcing.