Back to Search
Start Over
West Antarctic surface melt triggered by atmospheric rivers
- Source :
- Nature Geoscience, Nature Geoscience, 2019, 12 (11), pp.911-916. ⟨10.1038/s41561-019-0460-1⟩, Nature Geoscience, Nature Publishing Group, 2019, 12 (11), pp.911-916. ⟨10.1038/s41561-019-0460-1⟩
- Publication Year :
- 2019
- Publisher :
- HAL CCSD, 2019.
-
Abstract
- Recent major melting events in West Antarctica have raised concerns about a potential hydrofracturing and ice shelf instability. These events often share common forcings of surface melt-like anomalous radiative fluxes, turbulent heat fluxes and fohn winds. Using an atmospheric river detection algorithm developed for Antarctica together with surface melt datasets, we produced a climatology of atmospheric river-related surface melting around Antarctica and show that atmospheric rivers are associated with a large percentage of these surface melt events. Despite their rarity (around 12 events per year in West Antarctica), atmospheric rivers are associated with around 40% of the total summer meltwater generated across the Ross Ice Shelf to nearly 100% in the higher elevation Marie Byrd Land and 40–80% of the total winter meltwater generated on the Wilkins, Bach, George IV and Larsen B and C ice shelves. These events were all related to high-pressure blocking ridges that directed anomalous poleward moisture transport towards the continent. Major melt events in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet only occur about a couple times per decade, but a 1–2 °C warming and continued increase in atmospheric river activity could increase the melt frequency with consequences for ice shelf stability. Atmospheric rivers associated with blocking events are related to a large fraction of the surface ice melt events in West Antarctica, suggest observation-based analyses of atmospheric dynamics and West Antarctic surface melt.
- Subjects :
- geography
geography.geographical_feature_category
010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences
Turbulent heat
Elevation
Antarctic ice sheet
[PHYS.PHYS.PHYS-GEO-PH]Physics [physics]/Physics [physics]/Geophysics [physics.geo-ph]
Atmospheric river
010502 geochemistry & geophysics
01 natural sciences
Ice shelf
Ice melt
Oceanography
13. Climate action
General Earth and Planetary Sciences
Atmospheric dynamics
Meltwater
Geology
ComputingMilieux_MISCELLANEOUS
0105 earth and related environmental sciences
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 17520894
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Nature Geoscience, Nature Geoscience, 2019, 12 (11), pp.911-916. ⟨10.1038/s41561-019-0460-1⟩, Nature Geoscience, Nature Publishing Group, 2019, 12 (11), pp.911-916. ⟨10.1038/s41561-019-0460-1⟩
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....91e49e38815605140cc418dad348e83b