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Evaluation of a high-resolution regional climate simulation over Greenland

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Abstract

A simulation of the 1991 summer has been performed over south Greenland with a coupled atmosphere–snow regional climate model (RCM) forced by the ECMWF re-analysis. The simulation is evaluated with in-situ coastal and ice-sheet atmospheric and glaciological observations. Modelled air temperature, specific humidity, wind speed and radiative fluxes are in good agreement with the available observations, although uncertainties in the radiative transfer scheme need further investigation to improve the model’s performance. In the sub-surface snow-ice model, surface albedo is calculated from the simulated snow grain shape and size, snow depth, meltwater accumulation, cloudiness and ice albedo. The use of snow metamorphism processes allows a realistic modelling of the temporal variations in the surface albedo during both melting periods and accumulation events. Concerning the surface albedo, the main finding is that an accurate albedo simulation during the melting season strongly depends on a proper initialization of the surface conditions which mainly result from winter accumulation processes. Furthermore, in a sensitivity experiment with a constant 0.8 albedo over the whole ice sheet, the average amount of melt decreased by more than 60%, which highlights the importance of a correctly simulated surface albedo. The use of this coupled atmosphere–snow RCM offers new perspectives in the study of the Greenland surface mass balance due to the represented feedback between the surface climate and the surface albedo, which is the most sensitive parameter in energy-balance-based ablation calculations.

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Acknowledgements

Filip Lefebre was financed by the Belgian Scientific Research Programme “Global Change and Sustainable Development (contract CG/10/09B)” of the Prime Minister’s Science Policy Office, when writing this paper. We are very grateful to the Belgian Royal Meteorological Institute (KMI-IRM) for giving access to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) data services. Dominique Lucas (ECMWF, Reading) is thanked for help with the ERA data. The authors would like to thank The Antarctic Meteorological Research Center, Space Science and Engineering Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison as well as the National Science Foundation for the AWS-Klinck data. Philippe Huybrechts (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium) is thanked for kindly providing the Greenland topography and land mask data. We gratefully acknowledge the Belgian Fonds de la Recherche Fondamentale Collective for providing computer facilities under project 2.4556.99 “Simulation numérique et traitement de données”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut d’Astronomie et de Géophysique G. Lemaître, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Filip Lefebre, Xavier Fettweis, Jean-Pascal Van Ypersele & Philippe Marbaix

  2.  , Vito—Flemish Institute for Technological Research, Integral Environmental Studies, Boeretang 200, 2400, Mol, Belgium

    Filip Lefebre

  3. Laboratoire de Glaciologie et de Géophysique de l’Environnement, Grenoble, France

    Hubert Gallée

  4. Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Wouter Greuell

  5. Swiss Federal Research Station for Agroecology and Agriculture, Zurich, Switzerland

    Pierluigi Calanca

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  1. Filip Lefebre
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  2. Xavier Fettweis
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Correspondence to Filip Lefebre.

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Lefebre, F., Fettweis, X., Gallée, H. et al. Evaluation of a high-resolution regional climate simulation over Greenland. Climate Dynamics 25, 99–116 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-005-0005-8

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