This award supports research to couple a state-of-the-art ice sheet model to the Community Climate System Model (CCSM), thus allowing for century- and millennial-scale simulations of ice sheet growth and decay and of the resulting feedbacks on climate and the carbon cycle. Instead of prescribing ice sheet elevation and extent, greenhouse- warming simulations will include the effects of ice sheet melting on climate and sea level. Also, modelers will be able to run long-term simulations of major paleoclimate events such as the retreat of the Laurentide ice sheet.
This work is important because mechanisms of glacial-interglacial transitions are not fully understood, and because recent research suggests that ice sheets could be highly sensitive to global warming.
The broad impact of this work will be to improve predictions of sea level rise and other potentially severe socioeconomic effects of ice sheet melting. Melting of the Greenland ice sheet could raise global sea level by up to 7 meters. Melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet could contribute an additional 5 meters. Hundreds of millions of people live within a few meters of sea level. The Community Climate System Model (CCSM), to which the ice sheet model will be coupled, is used at numerous universities and laboratories in the United States and around the world. CCSM is a leading contributor to the IPCC assessment reports that provide an international consensus on climate change science and impacts.
