Around 25 international researchers and experts gathered in Ilulissat, West Greenland, last week under the leadership of DTU Space Professor Shfaqat Abbas Khan to review the progress of the Center for Ice-Sheet and Sea-Level Predictions (CISP).
The research centre is funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The workshop in Ilulissat marked the halfway point of the Foundation's six-year grant, while also providing an opportunity for the researchers to review a number of key scientific achievements.
”Everyone has made a tremendous effort. It was a great advantage to bring the entire consortium together in Greenland. We discussed the latest results, planned upcoming research activities and, at the same time, followed up on the field measurements from the Greenland Ice Sheet that form an important part of the foundation for our models,” says Shfaqat Abbas Khan, Director of CISP at DTU Space.
Baseline model completed
CISP has now developed a baseline model that forms the foundation for the next generation of data-driven models aimed at improving estimates of how melting land ice in Greenland and Antarctica affects global sea level.
The researchers have also developed a high-resolution model that describes month-by-month changes in the mass of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets over the past 30 years. This detailed reconstruction provides an unprecedented data foundation for understanding how the ice sheets respond to climate change and underpins the models that will project future sea-level rise.
26 scientific publications
The research centre has also reached an important milestone in scientific dissemination. So far, CISP has produced 26 peer-reviewed scientific publications, including some published in the international journals Science and Nature.
Publishing new scientific knowledge is a key objective of the research centre and helps ensure that its results benefit the international research community.
”We have now established the scientific foundation on which the remainder of the project will build. The baseline model is in place, we can describe month-by-month changes in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets over the past 30 years, and at the same time we see our research being translated into a substantial number of scientific publications. This shows that the project is progressing as planned,” says Shfaqat Abbas Khan.
CISP brings together researchers from DTU, GEUS, the University of Copenhagen and Dartmouth College in the United States in a broad consortium. The goal is to develop a new generation of models capable of providing more accurate projections of future sea-level rise, both globally and regionally.
Several participants combined the meeting with fieldwork on the Greenland Ice Sheet, where they serviced monitoring stations, retrieved data and installed new equipment. Shfaqat Abbas Khan himself visited five monitoring stations near Sermeq Kujalleq (Jakobshavn Glacier), which flows into the Ilulissat Icefjord and is the largest single contributor from Greenland to global sea-level rise.