Climate Change causes more snow and ice on Greenland

Right now, the hottest year ever appears to be causing an extra 4 billion tons a day or so of frozen stuff on Greenland.

Thanks to Patrick Moore, @EcoSenseNow, who tweeted: “Holy Shomoly, look what’s going down on Greenland. Ice World” after Richard Cowley posted the DMI link.

Source: Danish Climate Centre.

Over the last decade the Greenland Ice Sheet may have been losing 200Gt per year, but evidently, this winter it’s making some of that back. The Danish Climate Centre describes the graph:

The figure [above] shows the total daily contribution from all points on the ice sheet (top) and the same accumulated from September 1st to now (bottom). The blue curves show this season’s surface mass balance in gigatons (Gt; 1 Gt is one billion tons and corresponds to 1 cubic kilometer of water), and for comparison the mean curves from the historical model run are shown with two standard deviations on either side. Note that the accumulated curve does not end at 0 at the end of the year. Over the year, it snows more than it melts, but calving of icebergs also adds to the total mass budget of the ice sheet. Satellite observations over the last decade show that the ice sheet is not in balance. The calving loss is greater than the gain from surface mass balance, and Greenland is losing mass at about 200 Gt/yr.

Looks like there is a lot of snow in the southeast. Obviously climate models will show that climate change contributed to this.

In other news, climate change is also causing extreme cold in Canada this weekend. Thoughts go to our good friends there. Spots on Nullschool show parts of Canada at minus 30 C.

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