Greenland and Antarctic Mass Balances for Present and Doubled Atmospheric CO2 from the GENESIS Version-2 Global Climate Model

Abstract As anthropogenic greenhouse warming occurs in the next century, changes in the mass balances of Greenland and Antarctica will probably accelerate and may have significant effects on global sea level. Recent trends and possible future changes in these mass balances have received considerable attention in the glaciological literature, but until recently relatively few general circulation modeling (GCM) studies have focused on the problem. However, there are two significant problems in using GCMs to predict mass balance distributions on ice sheets: (i) the relatively coarse GCM horizontal resolution truncates the topography of the ice-sheet flanks and smaller ice sheets such as Greenland, and (ii) the snow and ice physics in most GCMs does not include ice-sheet-specific processes such as the refreezing of meltwater. Two techniques are described that attack these problems, involving (i) an elevation-based correction to the surface meteorology and (ii) a simple a posteriori correction for the refreezi...