A new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change has confirmed a long-standing prediction that snowfall in Antarctica will increase significantly as our planet warms.
Scientists say that planetary warming will increase snowfall in Antarctica. Image credit: Eli Duke / CC BY-SA 2.0.
Researchers have long suspected that snowfall in Antarctica increases during planetary warming and the impact of so much snow tied up on land would have a negative effect on global sea levels. However, models on what should happen during warm periods have not matched observational data.
“Intuitively, it makes sense that as it warms and more moisture is in the atmosphere, that it will fall as snow in Antarctica. The problem is that we’re not really seeing that through the past fifty years of observations – and documenting the relationship between changes in temperature and snow accumulation is difficult to do because of such strong natural variability,” said study co-author Dr Peter Clark of Oregon State University.
Dr Clark and his colleagues from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the University of Potsdam, and Utrecht University, looked to the past to examine ice core data to see what they could learn about the future.
They found that ice cores taken from the Antarctic Ice Sheet captured snow accumulation over time – and they could match that accumulation with established temperature data.
They focused on a period from 21,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago – when our planet came out of the last Ice Age.
What they found was that Antarctica warmed an average of 5 to 10 degrees Celsius during that period – and for every degree of warming, there was a 5 percent increase in snowfall.
They found that the ice core results agreed with projections from more than 30 computer models used to calculate future changes in snowfall.
“The result is that projected increasing snowfall will still have a limiting effect on sea level rise, but that impact will be some 20 percent less than previously expected,” Dr Clark said.
“Looking at the past gives us more confidence in anticipating what will happen in the future. The validation through ice core studies helps ground truth the computer models.”
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Katja Frieler et al. Consistent evidence of increasing Antarctic accumulation with warming. Nature Climate Change, published online March 16, 2015; doi: 10.1038/nclimate2574
