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Energy Moisture Balance Model Simulations of Laurentide Ice Sheet Mass Balance Responses to Early Holocene Enhanced Boreal Summer Insolation
1 University of Wisconsin - Madison
2 University of Wisconsin - Madison
3 The University of British Columbia - Vancouver
4 National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute for Space Studies
5 University of New Hampshire
Determining the mechanisms of past ice sheet retreat and demise provides key information for predicting the response of the Greenland Ice Sheet to future climate change. In order to understand the mass balance behavior of ice sheets under a warming climate, we will examine the most recent analogue to the future of the Greenland Ice Sheet, the retreat and disappearance of the Laurentide Ice Sheet (LIS) during the early Holocene. We will present new simulations of the LIS mass balance response to enhanced early Holocene boreal summer insolation and attendant climate warming using a physically based energy moisture balance model (EMBM) forced with output from the NASA GISS AOGCM simulation of 9 kyr BP climate. The EMBM predicted LIS behavior will be compared against a new LIS chronology for the early Holocene to assess the accuracy of the simulated retreat/melt rate. These simulations will estimate the sensitivity of a land-based Northern Hemisphere ice sheet to enhanced radiative forcing.