Driver Of Greenland's Ice Loss: Sunnier Days Behind 2/3 Of Surface Melt
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Stefan Hofer, a PhD candidate at the University of Bristol in England, and his colleagues looked into what the main drivers of that surface melt were, in particular the effect of cloud cover on melt. In satellite data spanning the past two decades, they saw a significant decrease in cloud cover over Greenland starting in the mid-90s, which would mean more sunlight was falling on the ice and driving melt.
Climate models the team used suggest that every 1 percent reduction in cloud cover leads to another 27 gigatons of melt (the U.S. uses about 1.3 gigatons of water per day, according to data from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey).
That sensitivity to cloud cover was “pretty astounding,” William Colgan, a senior researcher with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland who wasn’t involved in the study, said in an email.
The work, detailed Wednesday in Science Advances, shows that about two-thirds of Greenland’s surface melt in the past two decades has been driven by decreasing clouds cover and only one-third by warmer air temperatures. “Our results clearly show that the reduction in summer cloud cover is an important driver in the recent melt increase on the Greenland ice sheet,” Hofer said in an email.
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http://www.climatecentral.org/news/sunnier-skies-driving-greenland-melt-21578
