Average surface mass balance (SMB) components at 1 km for the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (1958-1995 and 1996-2015), links to RACMO2.3 model results in NetCDF format

The Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA) comprises multiple small glaciers and ice caps mostly concentrated on Ellesmere and Baffin Islands in the northern (NCAA) and southern parts (SCAA) of the archipelago, respectively. Because these glaciers are small and show complex geometries, current regional c...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Noël, Brice P Y
Format: Dataset
Language:English
Published: PANGAEA 2017
Subjects:
CAA
Canadian Arctic Archipelago
DATE/TIME
Event label
File content
File format
File name
File size
NCAA
Northern Canadian Arctic Archipelago
RACMO
SCAA
Southern Canadian Arctic Archipelago
Uniform resource locator/link to file
Arctic
albedo
Arctic Archipelago
Baffin
Online Access:https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.881315
https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.881315
Description
Summary:The Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA) comprises multiple small glaciers and ice caps mostly concentrated on Ellesmere and Baffin Islands in the northern (NCAA) and southern parts (SCAA) of the archipelago, respectively. Because these glaciers are small and show complex geometries, current regional climate models, using 5 to 20 km horizontal resolution, do not properly resolve surface mass balance (SMB) patterns. Here, we present a 58-year (1958-2015) reconstruction of daily SMB of the CAA, statistically downscaled to 1 km from the output of the regional climate model RACMO2.3 at 11 km. By correcting for biases in elevation and ice albedo, the downscaling method significantly improves runoff estimates over narrow outlet glaciers and isolated ice fields. Since the last two decades, NCAA and SCAA glaciers have experienced warmer conditions (+1.1°C) resulting in continued mass loss of 28.2 ± 11.5 Gt yr-1 and 22.0 ± 4.5 Gt yr-1 respectively, more than doubling (11.9 Gt yr-1) and doubling (11.9 Gt yr-1) the pre-1996 average. While the interior of NCAA ice caps can still buffer most of the additional melt, the lack of a perennial firn area over low-lying SCAA glaciers caused uninterrupted mass loss since the 1980s. In the absence of significant refreezing capacity, this indicates inevitable disappearance of these highly sensitive glaciers.

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