SOURCE: Climate Central
DATE: June 28, 2017
SNIP: In the past two decades, the Greenland ice sheet has become the biggest single contributor to rising sea levels, mostly from melt across its vast surface. That surface melt is, in turn, driven mostly by an uptick in clear, sunny summer skies, not just rising air temperatures, a new study finds.
While some of the water Greenland is flushing out to sea comes from warming ocean waters lapping away at the glaciers that drain the ice sheet, most is due to the melt across its surface during the summer.
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.