Greenland Ice Sheet drives sea-level rise differences between model and expert projections
Open Access
- Author:
- Aquino, Carl Fredrick
- Graduate Program:
- Geosciences
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- June 16, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Mark Patzkowsky, Program Head/Chair
Richard B Alley, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Murali Haran, Committee Member
Klaus Keller, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Vivek Srikrishnan, Committee Member - Keywords:
- sea-level rise
sea level
probabilistic inversion
Bayesian inversion
Greenland Ice Sheet
Antarctic Ice Sheet
climate risk
climate risk management
coastal hazards - Abstract:
- Sea level rise presents risks to coastal communities. Researchers cannot agree on the timing or amount of future sea-level rise contributions from land-ice reservoirs such as the Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Greenland Ice Sheet. Prior studies argued that these disagreements stem from uncertainties surrounding ice sheet processes such as deep-water calving rate-limited by fracture. Improving the understanding of what drives this disagreement can help to better inform decisions. Here, I assess the consistency of a recent expert assessment of sea level projections with a sea-level rise data-model framework calibrated to paleoclimatic and modern instrumental data. I use coupled probabilistic-Bayesian inversion to show that the fusion of the expert assessment and the data-model framework can capture past observations but shifts the range of projected contributions to sea-level rise to values larger than in the expert assessment and wider than implied by the data-model framework alone. I find that Greenland Ice Sheet contributions to sea-level rise drive this disagreement. These findings suggest that neither the expert assessment nor the data-model framework alone tells the whole story. I identify the Greenland Ice Sheet model parameters responsible for the differences in sea-level projections. This suggests focus areas for further research.