Initial Steps Toward a Hydrologic “Watershed” Model for the Ablation Zone of the Greenland Ice Sheet

Abstract:

Surface meltwater production on the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) is a well-documented phenomenon but we lack understanding of the physical mechanisms that control the production, transport, and fate of the meltwater. To address this, we present initial steps toward the development of a novel hydrologic model for supraglacial streamflow on the GrIS. Ice ablation and surface meteorology were measured during a 6-day field campaign in a 112 km2 ablation zone of southwest Greenland. We modeled ablation using SnowModel, an energy balance snow- and ice-ablation model. The required model inputs included standard surface meteorology and a digital elevation model (DEM), and the model outputs include all components of the energy balance and surface meltwater production for each grid cell in the ice-sheet watershed. Our next steps toward developing a complete hydrologic model for supraglacial streamflow in the ablation zone of the GrIS include the application of the meltwater-routing model HydroFlow to compare with in-situ measurements of supraglacial river discharge.