Heat, salt, and freshwater budgets for a glacial fjord in Greenland

Abstract:

Fjords link the ocean and outlet glaciers of the Greenland ice sheet. As the ice sheet loses mass – potentially triggered by submarine melting – measurements of ocean heat transport in fjords are increasingly being used to diagnose submarine melting and freshwater fluxes. The full budgets that underlie such methods, however, have been largely neglected. Here, we present complete heat, salt, and mass budgets for glacial fjords and new equations for inferring the freshwater fluxes of submarine melting and runoff. Building on estuarine studies of salt budgets, this method includes a decomposition of the fjord transports (into barotropic, exchange, and fluctuating components) that is crucial for conserving mass in the budgets and appropriately accounting for temporal variability. These methods are applied to moored records from Sermilik Fjord, near the terminus of Helheim Glacier, to evaluate the dominant balances in the fjord budgets and to estimate freshwater fluxes. We find two different regimes seasonally that align with the seasonal variations in fjord drivers: shelf variability from barrier winds and freshwater forcing. Our results highlight many important components of fjord budgets, particularly iceberg melting, heat/salt storage and barotropic fluxes, that have been neglected in previous estimates of submarine melting.