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Thin clouds drove Greenland’s record-breaking 2012 ice melt
http://www.news.wisc.edu/21638[font face=Serif][font size=5]Thin clouds drove Greenland’s record-breaking 2012 ice melt[/font]
April 3, 2013
[font size=3]If the sheet of ice covering Greenland were to melt in its entirety tomorrow, global sea levels would rise by 24 feet.
Three million cubic kilometers of ice won't wash into the ocean overnight, but researchers have been tracking increasing melt rates since at least 1979. Last summer, however, the melt was so large that similar events show up in ice core records only once every 150 years or so over the last four millennia.
"In July 2012, a historically rare period of extended surface melting raised questions about the frequency and extent of such events," says Ralf Bennartz, professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Space Science and Engineering Center. "Of course, there is more than one cause for such widespread change. We focused our study on certain kinds of low-level clouds."
…
Current climate models tend to underestimate the occurrence of the clouds ICECAPS researchers found, limiting those models' ability to predict cloud response to Arctic climate change and possible feedback like spiking rates of ice melt.
…[/font][/font]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12002April 3, 2013
[font size=3]If the sheet of ice covering Greenland were to melt in its entirety tomorrow, global sea levels would rise by 24 feet.
Three million cubic kilometers of ice won't wash into the ocean overnight, but researchers have been tracking increasing melt rates since at least 1979. Last summer, however, the melt was so large that similar events show up in ice core records only once every 150 years or so over the last four millennia.
"In July 2012, a historically rare period of extended surface melting raised questions about the frequency and extent of such events," says Ralf Bennartz, professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Space Science and Engineering Center. "Of course, there is more than one cause for such widespread change. We focused our study on certain kinds of low-level clouds."
…
Current climate models tend to underestimate the occurrence of the clouds ICECAPS researchers found, limiting those models' ability to predict cloud response to Arctic climate change and possible feedback like spiking rates of ice melt.
…[/font][/font]
