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EOS, TRANSACTIONS AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION, VOL. 90, NO. 3, doi:10.1029/2009EO030004, 2009

A Community Ice Sheet Model for Sea Level Prediction

William Lipscomb

Group T-3, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, N. M., USA


Robert Bindschadler

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., USA


Ed Bueler

University of Alaska Fairbanks, USA


David Holland

New York University, New York, USA


Jesse Johnson

University of Montana, Missoula, USA


Stephen Price

Group T-3, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, N. M., USA


Abstract

Building a Next-Generation Community Ice Sheet Model; Los Alamos, New Mexico, 18–20 August 2008; Recent observations show that ice sheets can respond to climate change on annual to decadal timescales and that the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an increasing rate. The current generation of ice sheet models cannot provide credible predictions of ice sheet retreat, as underscored by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its Fourth Assessment Report (2007). The IPCC provided neither a best estimate nor an upper bound for 21st-century sea level rise because of uncertainties in the dynamic response of ice sheets. In response to this need, a workshop was held at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The workshop was sponsored by the LANL Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics, with additional support from the U.S. Department of Energy and National Science Foundation. The workshop's goal was to create a detailed plan (including commitments from individual researchers) for developing, testing, and implementing a Community Ice Sheet Model (CISM) to aid in predicting sea level rise. This model will be freely available to the glaciology and climate modeling communities and will be the ice sheet component of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM), a major contributor to IPCC assessments.

Published 20 January 2009.

Index Terms: 0726 Cryosphere: Ice sheets; 0798 Cryosphere: Modeling; 1621 Global Change: Cryospheric change (0776).

Print Version (111549 bytes)

Citation: Lipscomb, W., R. Bindschadler, E. Bueler, D. Holland, J. Johnson, and S. Price (2009), A Community Ice Sheet Model for Sea Level Prediction, Eos Trans. AGU, 90(3), doi:10.1029/2009EO030004.