Back to opportunities | Category Index
These are the intended use-case/justification for one or multiple variable groups. Opportunities are linked to relevant experiment groups. Identifying opportunities helps to provide a structure to map variables against requirements. Each opportunity description will convey why this combination of variables and experiments is important and how they contribute to impact.
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| description | The output for this opportunity will allow the historical and future behaviour of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to simulated and assessed. The mass loss from these ice sheets is a key contributor to future sea level rise, and their freshwater input to the climate system provides an important forcing for ocean circulation and carbon and heat uptake. Ice sheets are also a key potential tipping element in the Earth System, so characterising this aspect of their future evolution may have huge societal impact. |
| expected_impacts | The data requested from the Historical and Scenario simulations will primarily be used to create boundary conditions for a large ensemble of standalone Ice Sheet Model (ISMs) simulations under the auspices of ISMIP7, although some ESMs in CMIP7 may conduct these simulations with ice sheet components coupled in as well. The variables in the landice\_greenland\_allfreq and landice\_antarctica\_allfreq groups are primarily aimed at ISMs, but if any of the variables can be provided by an ESM is would be valuable. This combination output from ESM and ISM simulations will allow the future contribution of the icesheets to sea level rise to be projected and the model and scenario uncertainty of those projections to be characterised. In addition to ISMIP7, other MIPs concerned with ice sheet behaviour, primarily TIPMIP, WhatIfMIP and MISOMIP may use these variables. |
| justification_of_resources | Sea Level Rise and Tipping Points are one of the key Themes of the WCRP Safe Landing Climates Lighthouse Activity and a major focus for stakeholders wishing to mitigate or adapt to the major potential impacts of climate change. Some output of piControl is requested as a way of calculating anomalies wrt the climate model equilibrium state - piControl030 would likely be sufficient. |
| lead_theme | Land & Land-Ice |
| minimum_ensemble_size | 1 |
| name | Ice sheet mass loss, contributions to sea level rise and freshwater flux input to the climate system |
| opportunity_id | 39 |
| data_request_themes | Land & Land-Ice |
| experiment_groups | picontrol, scenarios, historical |
| mips | PMIP, ISMIP7, TIPMIP |
| time_subsets | all |
| variable_groups | baseline_fixed, baseline_monthly, landice_antarctica_allfreq, landice_global_allfreq, landice_greenland_allfreq, ocean_grid |