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Glaciers in northern and southern Norway are subject to different daily and seasonal cycles of incoming solar radiation, which is presumably reflected in the importance of net solar radiation in their surface energy balance. We present a 3 year continuous record from an automatic weather station in the ablation zone of the ice cap Langfjordjøkelen, one of the most northerly glaciers of mainland Norway. Despite its location at 70°N, Langfjordjøkelen was found to have a maritime climate, with an annual mean air temperature of -1.0°C, frequent cloud cover and end-of-winter snow depths over 3m in all three years. The main melt season was May-October, but occasional melt events occurred on warm, cloudy winter days. Net solar and longwave radiation together accounted for 58% of the melt energy, with a positive contribution by net longwave radiation (7%). The sensible and latent heat fluxes supplied the remainder of the melt energy. Cloud optical thickness over Langfjordjøkelen was larger than on two glaciers in southern Norway, especially in the summer months. This resulted in a smaller contribution of net solar radiation to surface melt on Langfjordjøkelen; the effect of the higher latitude on net solar radiation was found to be small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The large uncertainty in future global glacier volume projections partly results from a substantial range in future climate conditions projected by global climate models. This study addresses the effect of global and regional differences in climate input data on the projected twenty-first century glacier contribution to sea-level rise. Glacier volume changes are calculated with a surface mass balance model combined with volume-area scaling, applied to 89 glaciers in different climatic regions. The mass balance model is based on a simplified energy balance approach, with separated contributions by net solar radiation and the combined other fluxes. Future mass balance is calculated from anomalies in air temperature, precipitation and atmospheric transmissivity, taken from eight global climate models forced with the A1B emission scenario. Regional and global sea-level contributions are obtained by scaling the volume changes at the modelled glaciers to all glaciers larger than 0.1 km 2 outside the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. This results in a global value of 0.102 ± 0.028 m (multi-model mean and standard deviation) relative sea-level equivalent for the period 2012–2099, corresponding to 18 ± 5 % of the estimated total volume of glaciers. Glaciers in the Antarctic, Alaska, Central Asia and Greenland together account for 65 ± 4 % of the total multi-model mean projected sea-level rise. The projected sea-level contribution is 35 ± 17 % larger when only anomalies in air temperature are taken into account, demonstrating an important compensating effect by increased precipitation and possibly reduced atmospheric transmissivity. The variability in projected precipitation and atmospheric transmissivity changes is especially large in the Arctic regions, making the sea-level contribution for these regions particularly sensitive to the climate model used. Including additional uncertainties in the modelling procedure and the input data, the total uncertainty estimate for the future projections becomes ±0.063 m. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding of long-term dynamics of glaciers and ice caps is vital to assess their recent and future changes, yet few long-term reconstructions using ice flow models exist. Here we present simulations of the maritime Hardangerjøkulen ice cap in Norway from the mid-Holocene through the Little Ice Age (LIA) to the present day, using a numerical ice flow model combined with glacier and climate reconstructions. In our simulation, under a linear climate forcing, we find that Hardangerjøkulen grows from ice-free conditions in the mid-Holocene to its maximum extent during the LIA in a nonlinear, spatially asynchronous fashion. During its fastest stage of growth (2300-1300 BP), the ice cap triples its volume in less than 1000 years. The modeled ice cap extent and outlet glacier length changes from the LIA until today agree well with available observations. Volume and area for Hardangerjøkulen and several of its outlet glaciers vary out-of-phase for several centuries during the Holocene. This volume-area disequilibrium varies in time and from one outlet glacier to the next, illustrating that linear relations between ice extent, volume and glacier proxy records, as generally used in paleoclimatic reconstructions, have only limited validity. We also show that the present-day ice cap is highly sensitive to surface mass balance changes and that the effect of the ice cap hypsometry on the mass balance-altitude feedback is essential to this sensitivity. A mass balance shift by +0.5mw.e. relative to the mass balance from the last decades almost doubles ice volume, while a decrease of 0.2mw.e. or more induces a strong mass balance-altitude feedback and makes Hardangerjøkulen disappear entirely. Furthermore, once disappeared, an additional +0.1mw.e. relative to the present mass balance is needed to regrow the ice cap to its present-day extent. We expect that other ice caps with comparable geometry in, for example, Norway, Iceland, Patagonia and peripheral Greenland may behave similarly, making them particularly vulnerable to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clouds are an important component of the climate system, yet our understanding of how they directly and indirectly affect glacier melt in different climates is incomplete. Here we analyse high-quality datasets from 16 mountain glaciers in diverse climates around the globe to better understand how relationships between clouds and near-surface meteorology, radiation and surface energy balance vary. The seasonal cycle of cloud frequency varies markedly between mountain glacier sites. During the main melt season at each site, an increase in cloud cover is associated with increased vapour pressure and relative humidity, but relationships to wind speed are site specific. At colder sites (average near-surface air temperature in the melt season <0 ∘ C), air temperature generally increases with increasing cloudiness, while for warmer sites (average near-surface air temperature in the melt season ≫0 ∘ C), air temperature decreases with increasing cloudiness. At all sites, surface melt is more frequent in cloudy compared to clear-sky conditions. The proportion of melt from temperature-dependent energy fluxes (incoming longwave radiation, turbulent sensible heat and latent heat) also universally increases in cloudy conditions. However, cloud cover does not affect daily total melt in a universal way, with some sites showing increased melt energy during cloudy conditions and others decreased melt energy. The complex association of clouds with melt energy is not amenable to simple relationships due to many interacting physical processes (direct radiative forcing; surface albedo; and co-variance with temperature, humidity and wind) but is most closely related to the effect of clouds on net radiation. These results motivate the use of physics-based surface energy balance models for representing glacier–climate relationships in regional- and global-scale assessments of glacier response to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

GROW Observatory is a project funded under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. Its aim is to establish a large scale (more than 20,000 participants), resilient and integrated 'Citizen Observatory' (CO) and community for environmental monitoring that is self-sustaining beyond the life of the project. This article describes how the initial framework and tools were developed to evolve, bring together and train such a community; raising interest, engaging participants, and educating to support reliable observations, measurements and documentation, and considerations with a special focus on the reliability of the resulting dataset for scientific purposes. The scientific purposes of GROW observatory are to test the data quality and the spatial representativity of a citizen engagement driven spatial distribution as reliably inputs for soil moisture monitoring and to create timely series of gridded soil moisture products based on citizens' observations using low cost soil moisture (SM) sensors, and to provide an extensive dataset of in situ soil moisture observations which can serve as a reference to validate satellite-based SM products and support the Copernicus in situ component. This article aims to showcase the initial steps of setting up such a monitoring network that has been reached at the mid-way point of the project's funded period, focusing mainly on the design and development of the CO monitoring network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global-scale 21st-century glacier mass change projections from six published global glacier models are systematically compared as part of the Glacier Model Intercomparison Project. In total 214 projections of annual glacier mass and area forced by 25 General Circulation Models (GCMs) and four Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) emission scenarios and aggregated into 19 glacier regions are considered. Global mass loss of all glaciers (outside the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets) by 2100 relative to 2015 averaged over all model runs varies from 18 ± 7% (RCP2.6) to 36 ± 11% (RCP8.5) corresponding to 94 ± 25 and 200 ± 44 mm sea-level equivalent (SLE), respectively. Regional relative mass changes by 2100 correlate linearly with relative area changes. For RCP8.5 three models project global rates of mass loss (multi-GCM means) of >3 mm SLE per year towards the end of the century. Projections vary considerably between regions, and also among the glacier models. Global glacier mass changes per degree global air temperature rise tend to increase with more pronounced warming indicating that mass-balance sensitivities to temperature change are not constant. Differences in glacier mass projections among the models are attributed to differences in model physics, calibration and downscaling procedures, initial ice volumes and varying ensembles of forcing GCMs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study suggests that cold-ice processes may be more widespread than previously assumed, even within temperate glacial systems. We present the first systematic mapping of cold ice at the snout of the temperate glacier Midtdalsbreen, an outlet of the Hardangerjøkulen icefield (Norway), from 43 line kilometres of ground-penetrating radar data. Results show a 40 m wide cold-ice zone within the majority of the glacier snout, where ice thickness is <10 m. We interpret ice to be cold-based across this zone, consistent with basal freeze-on processes involved in the deposition of moraines. We also find at least two zones of cold ice up to 15 m thick within the ablation area, occasionally extending to the glacier bed. There are two further zones of cold ice up to 30 m thick in the accumulation area, also extending to the glacier bed. Cold-ice zones in the ablation area tend to correspond to areas of the glacier that are covered by late-lying seasonal snow patches that reoccur over multiple years. Subglacial topography and the location of the freezing isotherm within the glacier and underlying subglacial strata likely influence the transport and supply of supraglacial debris and formation of controlled moraines. The wider implication of this study is the possibility that, with continued climate warming, temperate environments with primarily temperate glaciers could become polythermal in forthcoming decades with (i) persisting thinning and (ii) retreat to higher altitudes where subglacial permafrost could be and/or become more widespread. Adversely, the number and size of late-lying snow patches in ablation areas may decrease and thereby reduce the extent of cold ice, reinforcing the postulated change in the thermal regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]