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

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 pos...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
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 format
File name
File size
pan-Antarctica
Uniform resource locator/link to file
Antarctic
Southern Ocean
The Antarctic
Antarc*
Antarctica
Ice Sheet
Ice Shelf
Iceberg*
Sea ice
Online Access:https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.865335
https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.865335
Description
Summary: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 necessity to account for larger and giant icebergs in order to obtain accurate melt climatologies. The four monthly melt climatologies [mm/day] are available as netCDF files with 1°x1° spatial resolution and can be used, e.g., for sensitivity studies with uncoupled sea ice-ocean models, or as spatio-temporal templates for the redistribution of land ice from the Antarctic ice sheet over the Southern Ocean in climate models.

Similar Items