The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has estimated between 9 and 88 cm of sea level rise over the next hundred years. Of this, only negative 19 to 11 cm is attributed to the largest ice masses on the planet, the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. Over the last decade, dramatic activity in the outlet glaciers of Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula raise the possibility that these large ice sheets will have a much greater contribution to sea level rise over the next century than was predicted by the IPCC. Recent studies have shown these areas are exhibiting decadal scale changes in response to climate forcings, whereas IPCC models show that ice is not responsive to climate change over such short periods of time. Many believe the IPCC type models fail to show short term climate responses due to the simplifications they make to ice sheet mechanics. Here, we develop a higher-order model -- a new ice sheet model which contains all relevant flow physics. In order to gauge our progress, we perform a verification of our model around a structured set of experiments. The analysis reveals our model is performing well over a range of different scenarios.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:MONTANA/oai:etd.lib.umt.edu:etd-05302008-101724 |
| Date | 07 August 2008 |
| Creators | Fishbaugh, James |
| Contributors | Jesse Johnson, Joel Henry, James Jacobs |
| Publisher | The University of Montana |
| Source Sets | University of Montana Missoula |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.umt.edu/theses/available/etd-05302008-101724/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Montana or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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