Talk by Maria Hörhold

Maria Hörhold (from AWI) is visting CIC all day and will give a talk at 13:00 in room 235.


Title: Greenland warming rises above natural variability

Abstract: Whereas evidences for global warming are provided by temperature reconstructions from all regions of the earth, with the fastest warming rates observed in the Arctic region, bench-marking these observations against past natural climate variability remains challenging. Especially for the Greenland ice sheet, short instrumental records, sparse data and a pronounced natural variability hamper an unambiguous assessment of the recent warming.
We here present a climate record from North-Greenland with unprecedented quality. We find that the climate variability of the Greenland ice sheet is decoupled from the Arctic region, providing another reason for the lack of a definite warming signal in former studies.
However, by extending the original climate record to the year 2011 we can identify a warming signal, clearly rising above the natural variability of the last millennium.
Our findings imply that despite its decoupled position in the Arctic climate system, the recent global warming has undoubtedly reached the Greenland ice sheet, pushing local air temperature beyond known natural variability.