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Integration of Passive Tracers
in a Three-Dimensional Ice Sheet Model
Johannes Sutter, Malte Thoma and Gerrit Lohmann
Abstract Components of the climate system, such as ice sheets and marine
sediments serve as invaluable archives, which can be tapped into, to reconstruct
paleoclimate conditions. The relative abundance of hydrogen and oxygen isotopes
in ice cores is a proxy for past local temperature evolution. However the translation
of these proxies into temperature is not straightforward. Complex interdependencies
in the climate system can hide or override the local climate signal at which the ice
core was drilled. Using 3D ice sheet modelling in concert with passive tracer
advection one can simulate the isotopic distribution in ice sheets and compare them
to ice core data. Combining this method in a coupled climate model environment,
containing atmosphere and ocean components, one can theoretically simulate the
isotopic cycle from the source to the actual ice record. Such an approach would
greatly support the interpretation of proxy data whilst constraining the output of 3D
ice sheet models (ISMs). We present the implementation of passive tracer advection
in our 3D ISM RIMBAY (Thoma et al. in Geosci Model Dev 1:1
21,
2014
, Goeller
et al. in Cryosphere 7:1095
-
1106,
2014
) and asses the potential of the method to
reproduce chronologies of the polar ice sheets.
-
1 Introduction
The polar ice sheets contain information on past climate conditions conserved in the
form of relative abundances of hydrogen and oxygen isotopes. This information can
be tapped by drilling ice cores. Snow precipitating on the surface of an ice sheet
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