Feasibility of improving a priori regional climate model estimates of Greenland ice sheet surface mass loss through  assimilation of measured ice surface temperatures

Navari, M.; Margulis, S. A.; Bateni, S. M.; Tedesco, M.; Alexander, P.; Fettweis, X.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-10-103-2016

Articles | Volume 10, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-10-103-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-10-103-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 10, issue 1

Research article

|

18 Jan 2016

Research article |

| 18 Jan 2016

Feasibility of improving a priori regional climate model estimates of Greenland ice sheet surface mass loss through assimilation of measured ice surface temperatures

M. Navari, S. A. Margulis, S. M. Bateni, M. Tedesco, P. Alexander, and X. Fettweis

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Final revised paper (published on 18 Jan 2016)
Preprint (discussion started on 19 Jun 2015)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC C1149: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #1, 06 Jul 2015
RC C1406: 'Review #2', Anonymous Referee #2, 13 Aug 2015
AC C1629: 'Response to Reviewer Comments', Mahdi Navari, 15 Sep 2015

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Mahdi Navari on behalf of the Authors (26 Sep 2015) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (06 Oct 2015) by Edward Hanna

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (09 Oct 2015)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (09 Nov 2015)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

2nd Review of “Feasibility of improving a priori regional climate model estimates of Greenland ice sheet surface mass loss through assimilation of measured ice surface temperatures” by Navari et al.

The manuscript has improved, like the introduction, and quite a few errors or omissions have been corrected. Still, at some points the wording must be improved, but after that the manuscript is suitable for publication.

My comments are all related to the role of refreezing on the results. In brief: as no subsurface parameters in CROCUS are varied, the OSSE test thus implicitly assumes that refreezing is perfectly modeled. As refreezing is one of the poorest captured processes on the SMB of the GrIS, this is an important issue to be mentioned in the manuscript and abstract. However, except at the transition from the ablation zone to the percolation zone, refreezing has a limited effect, it either refreezes all (percolation zone) or relatively little (lower ablation zone) of the meltwater production. Therefore, no fundamental revision of the manuscript is required.

Abstract:
P2 L21 or L24, add something like: Since subsurface model properties were kept constant, meltwater refreezing is treated as perfectly modeled which positively affects the performance for estimating runoff and surface mass loss.

P3 8-12: “While” expresses a contradiction while for me the results of Van Angelen, Fettweis and Enderlin point to the same ongoing change: runoff will determine future mass loss and is its current importance is already growing.

P7 L22: “melt runoff from the snowpack”: use “meltwater” instead an of “melt”, furthermore, the ice sheet surface is not always a snowpack, in case of runoff there is most of the time only ice at the surface.
P7 L22: Add a comment that refreezing is implicitly included in this equation, in the sense that it is not a term in equation (1) but affects the SMB because it reduces runoff.

P8 L9-16: I requested this new part in my previous review, but the formulations included now are so general that they give little help on how the model works – and they are incorrect too. Have a look on your data how in general the fluxes are directed and remove this part. Instead:
P8 L23: Add a few lines on how the turbulent module works. I had a short look in Brun et al (1989), so I now know that CROCUS seems to use some kind of bulk method but the tuning parameters a and b (Brun et al, left column of p 334) are not given for CROCUS. As suggestion: if CROCUS were using the same method as explained in Van den Broeke et al (2008, Int J Clim), section 3.1, I would summarize the turbulent routine for this paper as
“CROCUS derives the turbulent sensible and latent heat fluxes using the bulk method (Van den Broeke and others, 2008), which applies Monin-Obukhov similarity theory to estimate fluxes from the near-surface wind speed and the temperature and humidity differences between the surface and the temperature at X m, prescribed by MAR. For non-neutral conditions, the stability functions proposed by Holtslag and De Bruijn (1988) and Dyer (1974) are applied to adapt the fluxes for stable and unstable atmospheric conditions, respectively.”

P19 L12-13: Add a comment that snowmelt is not necessarily zero but that refreezing inhibits runoff.
P19 L20: Add a comment that refreezing mitigates runoff and that refreezing is a poorly constrained process and not optimized by the OSSE described here; it is assumed to be modeled correctly.

P23 L24-P24 L2: The main problem is not that the truth is an outlier, but that the SML depends on refreezing and I don’t see how the SEB, which is optimized by OSSE, influences refreezing. Therefore, it should be added at this point that the effect of refreezing on SML is not optimized. This has no effect in the upper part of the percolation zone and dry snow zone because refreezing absorbs all melt water. It is also a relatively small problem in the lower ablation zone because SML fluxes are magnitude larger than the refreezing capacity. However, at the edge between the ablation zone and the percolation zone, this adds a significant non-assessed uncertainty. Here, refreezing reaches is largest contribution to the SMB. As refreezing not yet perfectly understood, hard to validate and differently modeled by various RCMs (Vernon 2013) despite the comparable overall SMB numbers and trends, it is by no way granted that it is correctly modeled by CROCUS. An idea how good OSSE removes errors in refreezing can only be assessed by using data from RCMs or adding additional constraints.

P24 L19: in this context of constraining refreezing, 10m snow temperatures might help because they provide a proxy of refreezing.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (Editor review) (09 Nov 2015) by Edward Hanna

AR by Mahdi Navari on behalf of the Authors (28 Nov 2015) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (08 Dec 2015) by Edward Hanna

AR by Mahdi Navari on behalf of the Authors (11 Dec 2015) Author's response

Short summary

An ensemble batch smoother was used to assess the feasibility of generating a reanalysis estimate of the Greenland ice sheet (GrIS) surface mass fluxes (SMF) via integrating measured ice surface temperatures with a regional climate model estimate. The results showed that assimilation of IST were able to overcome uncertainties in meteorological forcings that drive the GrIS surface processes. We showed that the proposed methodology is able to generate posterior reanalysis estimates of the SMF.