Dear Greenlanders
Increased melt on the Greenland ice sheet is in the news today with an article by Tom Parfitt (The Times, Wednesday July 31 2019). One of the people quoted in the article is Ruth Mottram from DMI (Danish Meteorological Institute) and she was interviewed on BBC Radio 4 around midday.
This set me thinking! Thirty years ago, I and Ole B. Olesen presented a paper on increased Greenland melt at a conference at the University of Washington in Seattle. It was later published in Annals of Glaciology (https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/E99A6D6167175DA35C5152772855052F/S0260305500008181a.pdf/increased_ablation_at_the_margin_of_the_greenland_ice_sheet_under_a_greenhouseeffect_climate.pdf)
The increased melt was calculated by perturbing an energy balance model at two locations in Greenland. The model was exceptionally well-constrained by hundreds of days of observed ablation stake measurements but two locations would not hack it today. Recent work in Greenland has stressed the nonlinear relation between melt and temperature increase and I am happy that our Fig. 3 shows a nonlinear relation. This represented an extrapolation because there was then (1989) no evidence of increased melting in Greenland or of rising temperatures. The paper was the second last paper on the last day of the Seattle conference and hardly caused a ripple except for a joke by Ed Waddington that I did not hear properly. The paper was cited in the First Assessment Report (1991) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) so it was not completely overlooked.
Roger Braithwaite
Senior Research Fellow
The University of Manchester
0161 275 7877
Honorary Senior Research Fellow
Geography - SEED
Humanities Bridgeford Building HBS 1.77
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL
Note new website and new telephone number:
www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/roger.braithwaite
Tel: Int + (0)161 275-7877
Sent: 31 July 2019 21:19
To: cryolist@cryolist.org
Subject: [CRYOLIST] Researcher in Antarctic Physical Oceanography
Professor of Physical Oceanography
President of EGU Ocean Sciences Division
Centre for Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences
School of Environmental Sciences
University of East Anglia
Norwich NR4 7TJ
-44-1603-592555
k.heywood@uea.ac.uk
Gold (Teaching Excellence Framework 2017-2020)
UK Top 15 (The Times/Sunday Times 2018 and Complete University Guide 2018)
World Top 200 (Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2018)
