EGU22-1648
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-1648
EGU General Assembly 2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Monthly-resolved Freshwater Flux from the Greenland Ice Sheet on a Glacier-Basin Scale

Nanna Bjørnholt Karlsson1, Kenneth D. Mankoff1, Anne M. Solgaard1, Signe Hillerup Larsen1, Robert S. Fausto1, and Louise S. Sørensen2
Nanna Bjørnholt Karlsson et al.
  • 1Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Glaciology and Climate, Copenhagen, Denmark (nbk@geus.dk)
  • 2Geodesy and Earth Observation, DTU Space, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark

The Greenland ice sheet outputs freshwater into the Greenlandic fjords in the form of icebergs and liquid meltwater. This freshwater flux affects the fjords’ water circulation and ecosystems. In recent decades, the mass loss from the ice sheet has increased causing an increasing volume of liquid and solid freshwater to enter the fjords and ocean around Greenland. The total volume of freshwater is currently challenging to determine on a fjord-basin scale due to disparate products that are difficult to compare and combine into a cohesive product. This entails that the effect of the glacially derived freshwater on fjord circulation and ecosystem is not well constrained.

Here, we present a new glacier-basin scale product that combines three existing products into a shared temporal and spatial framework. We use publicly available datasets of solid ice discharge (icebergs), surface meltwater run-off, and basal melt to present a cohesive overview of the influx of freshwater to the Greenlandic fjords. We then quantify the different dominant term for each glacier. The dataset will be freely available and will be of use to, for example, oceanographic and marine biological research activities.

This work was supported by PROMICE (Programme for Monitoring the Greenland Ice Sheet, GEUS) and ESA Polar+ 4D Greenland.

How to cite: Karlsson, N. B., Mankoff, K. D., Solgaard, A. M., Larsen, S. H., Fausto, R. S., and Sørensen, L. S.: Monthly-resolved Freshwater Flux from the Greenland Ice Sheet on a Glacier-Basin Scale, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-1648, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-1648, 2022.