[en] The Canadian Arctic Archipelago comprises multiple small glaciers and ice caps, mostly concentrated on Ellesmere and Baffin Islands in the northern (NCAA, Northern Canadian Arctic Archipelago) and southern parts (SCAA, Southern Canadian Arctic Archipelago) 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 patterns. Here we present a 58-year (1958-2015) reconstruction of daily surface mass balance of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, 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 and 22.0 ± 4.5 Gt/year, respectively, more than doubling (11.9 Gt/year) and doubling (11.9 Gt/year) 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 has caused uninterrupted mass loss since the 1980s. In the absence of significant refreezing capacity, this indicates inevitable disappearance of these highly sensitive glaciers.
Disciplines :
Earth sciences & physical geography
Author, co-author :
Noël, Brice ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département de géographie > Climatologie et Topoclimatologie ; Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands
van de Berg, Willem Jan ; Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands
Lhermitte, Stef ; Department of Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands
Wouters, Bert ; Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands
Schaffer, Nicole ; Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada ; Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Zonas Áridas (CEAZA), Universidad de La Serena, La Serena, Chile
van den Broeke, Michiel R. ; Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands
Language :
English
Title :
Six decades of glacial mass loss in the Canadian arctic archipelago
NWO - Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek NESSC - Netherlands Earth System Science Centre
Funding text :
B. Noël, W. J. van de Berg, B. Wouters, and M. R. van den Broeke acknowledge support from the Polar Programme of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO/ALW) and the Netherlands Earth System Science Centre (NESSC). All data are available from authors without conditions. Mass balance measurements from the Meighen, Agassiz, Penny, and Devon ice caps were conducted under the Climate Change Geoscience Program (Geological Survey of Canada, Natural Resources Canada) and under McGill University for White Glacier. Logistical support for all fieldwork was provided by the Polar Continental Shelf Project (Natural Resources Canada). We thank the Nunavut Research Institute, Aurora Research Institute, and northern communities for granting permission to conduct research on ice caps and glaciers in the CAA. This compilation of SMB measurements was first published in Gardner et al. (2011). Mass change estimates derived from ICESat and CryoSat-2 are freely available from the authors upon request. Annual mean SMB, total precipitation (from rain and snowfall), total melt (from snow and ice), and runoff (mm w.e./year) covering the NCAA and SCAA at 1 km resolution and averaged for the two periods 1958–1995 and 1996–2015, respectively, can be freely downloaded from PANGAEA at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.881315. The daily, 1 km SMB data set and associated components for both NCAA and SCAA (1958–2015) are available from the authors without conditions upon request. B. N. prepared the manuscript, carried out the RACMO2.3 simulation, and produced the downscaled data sets at 1 km for NCAA and SCAA, respectively. B. N., W. J. B., and M. R. B. conceived the downscaling procedure and analyzed the data. W. J. B. carried out the hypsometry change sensitivity experiments. N. S. kindly provided unpublished SMB measurements over Penny ice cap in the SCAA. S. L. processed the 1 km MODIS albedo product. B. W. produced and analyzed the ICESat/CryoSat-2 data sets. All authors commented on the manuscript.
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