Regional Scale Mass Balance of Ice Caps in Arctic Canada

We have recently started a project to model the regional scale mass balance of the Canadian Arctic ice caps on a variety of time scales ranging from the entire Holocene to the last 50 years and next century. This work is funded by the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences through the Polar Climate Stability Network led by Dick Peltier (Toronto). Gabe Wolken, Alex Gardner, and Ben Gready are working on this project. Our collaborators are Andy Bush (Climate Modelling) and Shawn Marshall (Calgary; Regional Ice Dynamics Modelling).

Alex Gardner is working on the problem of downscaling temperature and precipitation fields derived from Regional Climate Model Simulations or the results of Atmospheric Reanalyses to the complex topography of Arctic Icefields for use as inputs to mass balance models. He will also be developing a mass balance model that can be run at the scale of the whole Arctic Archipelago. Ben Gready is working on setting up the Polar MM5 Regional Climate model to accept input from Global Climate Models and perform climate simulations for the Arctic Archipelago for selected periods during the Holocene and for the past 50 and next 100 years. Gabe Wolken is working on the use of remote sensing to develop means of validating output from both Polar MM5 and the regional mass balance model. Results from the mass balance simulations will be passed to Shawn Marshall for use in driving a regional scale model of ice dynamics.

Alex Gardner is in the process of compiling all available on-ice measurements of air temperature from Arctic Canada for use in testing the success of temperature downscaling methods. He is also looking after our network of automatic weather stations (AWS) and air temperature monitoring sites on the Devon Island Ice Cap, and is hoping to develop a network of AWS that can be interrogated by satellite for eventual deployment on all the major ice caps in the Queen Elizabeth Islands. In due course we also plan to develop a network of shallow ice cores for these ice caps that will allow us to reconstruct the history of air temperatures, summer melt and annual net accumulation across these ice caps.