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Abstract:
Due to the poor understanding of marine- and lake-terminating glaciers dynamics, glacier mass loss through frontal ablation is still one of the major uncertainties in global mass change projections. Global glacier models have simulated frontal ablation, if at all, based on a simple empirical linear relationship based on water depth, ice thickness, and glacier width (so-called k-calving). Here we couple the Simple Estimator of Retreat Magnitude and ice flux (SERMeQ), which is a flowline network model of ice dynamics based on viscoplastic rheology, to the Python Glacier Evolution Model (PyGEM) to simulate the frontal ablation of water-terminating glaciers. We apply the model both to the idealized glacier and bedrock geometries as well as several water-terminating glaciers differing in size and climatic setting. Finally, we compare the frontal ablation simulated by SERMeQ with that by the ‘k-calving’ scheme and explore how the frontal ablation impact glacier mass change projections.
