Ablation observations for 2008-2011 from the Programme for Monitoring of the Greenland Ice Sheet (PROMICE)

Abstract

Recent estimates from the glaciological community agree that the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass at an accelerated pace due to climate change (Velicogna 2009; Khan et al. 2010; Rignot et al. 2011). This has caught the attention of the public and policy makers due to the potential impact on sea-level rise (Dahl-Jensen et al. 2009). The mass loss can be attributed approximately equally to increases in meltwater runoff from surface melt and iceberg production (van den Broeke et al. 2009). The robustness of mass-balance predictions relies heavily on observational data from the Greenland ice sheet and in recent years the need for frequent, reliable surface mass-balance measurements has increased (IPCC 2007; Dahl-Jensen et al. 2009). In anticipation of this need, the Programme for Monitoring of the Greenland Ice Sheet (PROMICE) was initiated in 2007, delivering in situ data from a network of automatic weather stations (AWS) covering eight different regions of the ice sheet (Fig. 1; van As et al. 2011). Apart from the direct insight into the surface mass balance provided by these stations, the in situ data are also valuable for calibrating and validating melt estimates from remote sensors and surface mass-balance models (Dahl-Jensen et al. 2009). In this paper, we present the ablation records for the PROMICE AWSs for 2008–2011, and the impact of the extraordinary atmospheric conditions on ablation in 2010 (Tedesco et al. 2011) are compared to the other years.