Increasing extreme melt in northeast Greenland linked to foehn winds and atmospheric rivers

Kyle S Mattingly; Jenny V Turton; Jonathan D Wille; Brice Noël; Xavier Fettweis; Åsa K Rennermalm; Thomas L Mote

doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37434-8

Increasing extreme melt in northeast Greenland linked to foehn winds and atmospheric rivers

Nat Commun. 2023 Mar 29;14(1):1743. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-37434-8.

Authors

Kyle S Mattingly^{1

2}, Jenny V Turton^{3

4}, Jonathan D Wille^{5

6}, Brice Noël^{7

8}, Xavier Fettweis⁸, Åsa K Rennermalm⁹, Thomas L Mote¹⁰

Affiliations

¹ Space Science and Engineering Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA. ksmattingly@wisc.edu.
² Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ, USA. ksmattingly@wisc.edu.
³ Climate System Research Group, Institute of Geography, Friedrich-Alexander University, Erlangen, Germany.
⁴ Arctic Frontiers AS, Tromsø, Norway.
⁵ Institut des Géosciences de l'Environnement, CNRS/UGA/IRD/G-INP, Saint Martin d'Hères, France.
⁶ Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
⁷ Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
⁸ Department of Geography, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium.
⁹ Department of Geography, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
¹⁰ Department of Geography, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA.

Abstract

The Greenland Ice Sheet has been losing mass at an increased rate in recent decades. In northeast Greenland, increasing surface melt has accompanied speed-ups in the outlet glaciers of the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream, which contain over one meter of sea level rise potential. Here we show that the most intense northeast Greenland melt events are driven by atmospheric rivers (ARs) affecting northwest Greenland that induce foehn winds in the northeast. Near low-elevation outlet glaciers, 80-100% of extreme (> 99^th percentile) melt occurs during foehn conditions and 50-75% during ARs. These events have become more frequent during the twenty-first century, with 5-10% of total northeast Greenland melt in several recent summers occurring during the ~1% of times with strong AR and foehn conditions. We conclude that the combined AR-foehn influence on northeast Greenland extreme melt will likely continue to grow as regional atmospheric moisture content increases with climate warming.

Abstract

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