Jostedalsbreen in western Norway is the mainland Europe's largest ice cap and a complex system of more than 80 glaciers. While observational records indicate a significant sensitivity to climate fluctuations, knowledge about ice-cap wide spatiotemporal mass changes and their drivers remain sparse. Here, we quantify the surface mass balance (SMB) of Jostedalsbreen from 1960 to 2020 using a temperature-index model within a Bayesian framework. We assimilate seasonal glaciological SMB to constrain accumulation and ablation, and geodetic mass balance to adjust model parameters for each glacier individually. Overall, we find that Jostedalsbreen has experienced a small mass loss of −0.07 m w.e. a−1 (−0.21 to +0.08 m w.e. a−1), but with substantial spatiotemporal variability. Our results suggest that winter SMB variations were the main control on annual SMB between 1960 and 2000, while increasingly negative summer SMB is responsible for substantial mass losses after 2000. Spatial variations in SMB between glaciers or regions of the ice cap are likely associated with local topography and its effect on orographic precipitation. We advocate for models to leverage the growing availability of observational resources to improve SMB predictions. We demonstrate an approach that incorporates complementary datasets, while addressing their inherent uncertainties, to constrain models and provide robust estimates of spatiotemporal SMB and associated uncertainties.

There follows the open discussion which took place at the IGS symposium on ‘The Edges of Glaciology’, in July 2023. The discussion was curated by Doug Benn. The time of speaking in minutes and seconds into the Panopto recording is given in bold figures. The recording itself is provided as electronic supplementary material. It has been transcribed and edited by Andrew Fowler, with much (and much-needed) assistance from the participants. Footnotes (mostly references) are editorial intrusions.

Sea-ice deformation is concentrated at linear kinematic features such as ridges and leads. Ridging and leads opening processes are highly related to sea-ice fracture. Different rheology models have been successfully applied in various scenarios. However, most of the approaches adopted are based on continuum mechanics that do not explicitly model fracture processes. There are emerging needs for a more physically informed modelling methods that explicitly address fracture at the kilometre scale. In pursuing this objective, in this paper we explored the potential of applying a promising mesh free numerical method, peridynamics (PD), in modelling ice floe (~km) fractures. PD offers a physically and mathematically consistent theory through which spontaneous emergence and propagation of cracks can be achieved. The integral nature of the governing equations in PD remains valid even if a crack appears. We numerically investigated in this paper the tensile fracture (e.g. lead opening) of an elastic heterogenous ice floe. The modelling results were compared with published numerical results obtained by another numerical method. The potentials and challenges of PD in this application are discussed and summarized.

Classical sea-ice models in climate model resolution do not resolve the small-scale physics of sea ice. New methods to address this problem include modifications to established viscous-plastic (VP) rheology models, sub-gridscale parameterizations or new rheologies such as the Maxwell elasto-brittle (MEB) rheology. Here, we investigate differences in gridscale dynamics simulated by the VP and MEB models, their dependency on tunable model parameters and their response to added stochastic perturbations of material parameters in a new implementation in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology general circulation model. Idealized simulations are used to demonstrate that material parameters can be tuned so that both VP and MEB rheologies lead to similar cohesive stress states, arching behaviour and heterogeneity in the deformation fields. As expected, simulations with MEB rheology generally show more heterogeneity than the VP model as measured by the number of simulated linear kinematic features (LKFs). For both rheologies, the cohesion determines the emergence of LKFs. Introducing gridscale heterogeneity by random model parameter perturbation, however, leads to a larger increase of LKF numbers in the VP simulations than in the MEB simulations and similar heterogeneity between VP and MEB models.

Glacier and snow melt are the primary sources of water for streams, and rivers in upper Indus region of the western Himalaya. However, the magnitude of runoff from this glacierized basin is expected to vary with the available energy in the catchment. Here, we used a physically based energy balance model to estimate the surface energy and surface mass balance (SMB) of the upper Chandra Basin glaciers for 7 hydrological years from 2015 to 2022. A strong seasonality is observed, with net radiation being the dominant energy flux in the summer, while latent and sensible heat flux dominated in the winter. The estimated mean annual SMB of the upper Chandra Basin glaciers is −0.51 ± 0.28 m w.e. a−1, with a cumulative SMB of −3.54 m w.e during 7 years from 2015 to 2022. We find that the geographical factors like aspect, slope, size and elevation of the glacier contribute towards the spatial variability of SMB within the study region. The findings reveal that a 42% increase in precipitation is necessary to counteract the additional mass loss resulting from a 1°C increase in air temperature for the upper Chandra Basin glaciers.

The propagation of elastic-flexural–gravity waves through an ice shelf is modeled using full three-dimensional elastic models that are coupled with a treatment of under-shelf sea-water flux: (i) finite-difference model (Model 1), (ii) finite-volume model (Model 2) and (iii) depth-integrated finite-difference model (Model 3). The sea-water flow under the ice shelf is described by a wave equation involving the pressure (the sea-water flow is treated as a “potential flow”). Numerical experiments were undertaken for an ice shelf with ‘rolling’ surface morphology, which implies a periodic structure of the ice shelf. The propagation of ocean waves through an ice shelf with rolling surface morphology is accompanied by Bragg scattering (also called Floquet band insulation). The numerical experiments reveal that band gaps resulting from this scattering occur in the dispersion spectra in frequency bands that are consistent with the Bragg’s law. Band gaps render the medium opaque to wave, that is, essentially, the abatement of the incident ocean wave by ice shelf with rolling surface morphology is observed in the models. This abatement explains the ability of preserving of ice shelves like the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, Ellesmere Island, Canadian Arctic, from the possible resonant-like destroying impact of ocean swell.

The two main large-scale features of Arctic sea-ice drift are the Beaufort Gyre and the Transpolar Drift Stream. They exhibit strong intraseasonal and interannual variability. Winter 2016/17 showed increased cyclone activity, leading to the collapse of the Beaufort Sea high and the reversal of the Beaufort Gyre. Winter 2020/21 displayed decreased cyclone activity and intense anticyclonic ice transport in the Beaufort Gyre. Here we show that the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’s (ECMWF) extended-range (46 days) retrospective forecasts were able to predict the ice motion during these cases. The initial contrasts in sea level pressure, surface winds and ice drift were well captured, and their temporal evolution—including the reversal of the usual drift direction—well reproduced by the forecasts initialized about a week before the event. Sea-ice thickness in the forecast exhibited initial errors even greater than 1 m that persisted throughout the forecast and negatively affected the ice speed forecast. Despite these shortcomings, the dynamic forecast outperformed the persistence and climatology forecast and represented the observed relation between surface winds and ice drift well. The benefit of dynamic forecasts is especially clear in cases that differ from climatology, like the one we focus on.

Passive microwave measurements of Arctic sea ice have been conducted over the last 50 years from space and during airborne, ship- and ground-based measurement campaigns. The different radiometric signatures of distinct surface types have led to satellite retrievals of, e.g., sea-ice concentration. In contrast, ground-based upward-viewing radiometers measure radiation emitted from the atmosphere and are used to retrieve atmospheric variables. Here, we present results from a ship-based radiometer setup with a mirror construction, which allows us to switch between atmospheric and surface measurements flexibly. This way, in summer 2022, surface observations in the Arctic marginal sea-ice zone could be performed from the research vessel Polarstern by two radiometers covering the frequency range from 22 to 243 GHz. At low frequencies, the brightness temperatures show clear signatures of different surface conditions. We estimate emissivities at 53∘ zenith angle from infrared-based skin temperatures. Predominantly vertically polarized 22–31 GHz emissivities are between 0.51 and 0.55 for open ocean and around 0.95 for sea ice. Predominantly horizontally polarized 243 GHz ocean emissivities are around 0.78 and ice surfaces exhibit a large variability from 0.67 to 0.82. Our results can improve the characterization of surface emissions in satellite retrieval algorithms.