Temperature and Snowfall in Western Queen Maud Land Increasing Faster Than Climate Model Projections

• Main Authors: Medley, B., McConnell, Joseph R., Neumann, T. A., Reijmer, C. H., Chellman, N., Sigl, M., Kipfstuhl, Sepp
• Other Authors: Sub Dynamics Meteorology, Marine and Atmospheric Research
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Antarctic; East Antarctic Ice Sheet; Queen Maud Land; Antarc*; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/363485

East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) mass balance is largely driven by snowfall. Recently, increased snowfall in Queen Maud Land led to years of EAIS mass gain. It is difficult to determine whether these years of enhanced snowfall are anomalous or part of a longer-term trend, reducing our ability to assess the mitigating impact of snowfall on sea level rise. We determine that the recent snowfall increases in western Queen Maud Land (QML) are part of a long-term trend (+5.2 ± 3.7% decade-1) and are unprecedented over the past two millennia. Warming between 1998 and 2016 is significant and rapid (+1.1 ± 0.7°C decade-1). Using these observations, we determine that the current accumulation and temperature increases in QML from an ensemble of global climate simulations are too low, which suggests that projections of the QML contribution to sea level rise are potentially overestimated with a reduced mitigating impact of enhanced snowfall in a warming world.