, 2010). There, the additional freshwater accumulates west of Greenland and leaves the subpolar gyre largely unaffected. The same effect is

seen in our simulation (Fig. 7). Ice mass loss like in our scenario does not lead to significant decrease in the height of the ice sheet. We therefore do not expect any changes in the feedbacks between the ice sheet and the atmosphere. Since retreat of glaciers does affect the interaction with the ocean (at least locally), some feedbacks will www.selleckchem.com/Proteasome.html be affected by ice melt. We try to account for one of these, basal melt, but a detailed treatment requires more advanced modelling. Climate scenarios contain a lot of uncertain elements. Such scenarios are also subject to change. By being a precise as possible we hope to accommodate future scenarios. We have presented a simple, yet flexible way to apply a patterned freshwater forcing to the ocean surface based on realistic, yet high-end, Greenland and Antarctica Thiazovivin cell line mass loss scenarios. The projection of run-off (R  ), basal melt (B  ), and ice discharge (D  ) in excess of balanced values—which

have not been met in Greenland for the past twenty years—show an increase in the calving rates of both the Antarctic and Greenland glaciers. The final contributions of excess production of R,B and D remain within the maximum bounds determined by Pfeffer et al. (2008). In the scenario we used, it was assumed that a collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet occurs, which will accelerate mass loss tremendously before mid-century. The total mass loss from the two large ice sheets becomes dominated by the ice discharge contribution. The sea-surface height in the sub-polar gyre in the North Atlantic is affected

only little, Farnesyltransferase with a smaller than average increase throughout the 21st century. The area around Antarctica sees a steady increase on the other hand, and maximal values can be found there. This is due to the large forcing in the region associated with iceberg calving in the scenario. The protocol we have proposed aims to provide an affordable way to extent the current numerical models to deal with melting ice sheets. Effects like a realistic spatial pattern of freshwater accumulation are encouraging. Thanks go out to Wilco Hazeleger, Roderik van de Wal, Camiel Severijns, and especially Caroline Katsman, for useful comments and suggestions. The authors also thank Bob Marsh and Vladimir Ivchenko for contributing their iceberg simulation. We would also like to thank our three anonymous referees for their suggestions and comments. This work was funded by the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme, under Grant Agreement number 282672, EMBRACE project. “
“Several authors (Kim et al., 2008, Brown and Wolf, 2009, Roland et al.