Greenland Ice Sheet Growing

at Record Rate
“It’s already above average for the whole year and it’s still March.
...................................................................................................

---

. Imagine what it’s going to be like at this rate in June? Or will there even be a melt season?”
Current Surface Mass Budget of the Greenland Ice Sheet

Here you can follow the daily surface mass balance on the Greenland Ice Sheet. The snow and ice model from one of DMI’s climate models is driven every six hours with snowfall, sunlight and other parameters from a research weather model for Greenland, Hirlam-Newsnow. We can thereby calculate the melting energy, refreezing of melt water and sublimation (snow that evaporates without melting first). The result of this is a change in the snow and ice from one day to the next and this change is shown below. All numbers are in water equivalent, that is, the amount of water the snow and ice would correspond to if it was melted.

The model has been updated in 2014 to better account for meltwater refreezing in the snow, and again in 2015 to account for the lower reflectivity of sunlight in bare ice than in snow. The update means that the new maps, values and curves will deviate from the previous ones. Everything shown on this site, however, is calculated with this new model, so that all curves and values are comparable.

more