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 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

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.