Impact of the spatial resolution on the Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Mass Balance modelling using the regional climate model MAR with the aim to force an ice sheet model.

By using the regional climate model MAR (Modèle Atmosphérique Régional), validated for Greenland at 25km resolution and forced every 6 hours with the ERA-INTERIM reanalysis (Fettweis 2007, Fettweis et al. 2010), we have modelled the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) Surface Mass Balance (SMB) at 20, 25, 30, 40 and 50km resolution to assess the impact of the spatial resolution. As part of the ICE2SEA project, the 25km-resolution SMB outputs of the MAR model are used as forcing fields for ice sheet models, in order to produce future projections of the GrIS contribution to sea-level rise over the next 200 years. Although the current spatial resolution of the MAR model (25km) is much higher than the general circulation models (GCM) resolution (150-300km), the ice sheet models often run at a higher resolution (typically 5-10km). Nevertheless, such higher-resolution runs of the MAR model on the same integration domain generate a significant additional computing time and are not doable until now. Moreover, conventional linear interpolations of the SMB outputs onto a higher-resolution grid, generally induce biases because ice sheet masks at different spatial resolutions do not match and the SMB is a very complex function of the spatial resolution and the topography . That is why several enhanced SMB interpolations are tested here in order to reduce biases when interpolating the MAR outputs onto higher resolution, in the framework of the ICE2SEA project.