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Abstract
For several decades, the Greenland ice sheet has been rapidly and continuously melting, causing changes in surface mass balance and destabilizing large parts of the ice sheet. However, melting across the ice sheet is not evenly distributed as shown by the acceleration of surface melt in the northwest, especially during periods of anomalously slow-moving high-pressure systems known as atmospheric blocks. As blocking events are predicted to become more frequent and intense, it is imperative to understand how blocking has changed from the past to help understand how they could change in the future. The key findings are that extreme blocking has more reliably contributed to mass loss in northwestern Greenland especially since the latter half of the 2010s, and that recent mass loss is of a greater magnitude due to an increase in runoff, temperatures, and positive sensible heat flux, as well as a decrease in snowfall, greater rainfall, and a resulting reduction in surface albedo.