Regional grid refinement in an Earth system model: impacts on the simulated Greenland surface mass balance

van Kampenhout, Leonardus; Rhoades, Alan M.; Herrington, Adam R.; Zarzycki, Colin M.; Lenaerts, Jan T. M.; Sacks, William J.; van den Broeke, Michiel R.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-13-1547-2019

Articles | Volume 13, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-13-1547-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-13-1547-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 13, issue 6

Research article

|

03 Jun 2019

Research article |

| 03 Jun 2019

Regional grid refinement in an Earth system model: impacts on the simulated Greenland surface mass balance

Leonardus van Kampenhout, Alan M. Rhoades, Adam R. Herrington, Colin M. Zarzycki, Jan T. M. Lenaerts, William J. Sacks, and Michiel R. van den Broeke

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-13-1547-2019-supplement

Data sets

Postprocessed output from VR-CESM with refinement over the greater Greenland area and a CAM-SE control experiment Leo van Kampenhout https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2579606

Short summary

A new tool is evaluated in which the climate and surface mass balance (SMB) of the Greenland ice sheet are resolved at 55 and 28 km resolution, while the rest of the globe is modelled at ~110 km. The local refinement of resolution leads to improved accumulation (SMB > 0) compared to observations; however ablation (SMB < 0) is deteriorated in some regions. This is attributed to changes in cloud cover and a reduced effectiveness of a model-specific vertical downscaling technique.