ISMASS Meetings

If you are interested in participating or organizing an ISMASS event, please contact Heiko Goelzer, the ISMASS Chair.

2022 ISMASS workshop Ice Sheets: Weather versus Climate

Reykjavik, 23-24 August 2022. Sponsored by CliC/SCAR/IASC and affiliated with Cryosphere 2022.

2018 ISMASS Workshop: Update on mass balance of Greenland and Antarctica (linkages between data and models)

POLAR2018, Davos, Switzerland
June 15, 2018, all-day

2015 ISMASS Steering Committee Meeting

Churchill College, Cambridge, UK
18 August 2015, 5:30-7:30 PM
Contact Catherine Ritz

ISMASS Workshop on the Marine Ice Sheet and Ice Shelf‐Ocean Model Intercomparison Projects

Churchill College, Cambridge, UK
16 August 2015

Constraining uncertainty in Greenland Ice Sheet surface mass balance model output and in situ validation

University of Sheffield, UK
19-20 May 2015
Contact Edward Hanna

GIA Modeling 2015

Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska – Fairbanks, Alaska, USA
26 – 29 May 2015
Contact Pippa Whitehouse

ISMASS Session at Our Common Future Under Climate Change Conference

Paris, France
7-10 July 2015
Contact Catherine Ritz

ISMASS 2014 Steering Committee Meeting

Monday, 25 August 2014
Auckland, New Zealand

Workshop on ice-sheet future projections

Linked with the SCAR Open Science Conference
Auckland, New Zealand
Tuesday 26 August 2014, 6-8 pm. Auckland Room 3
Contact Catherine Ritz

The objective was to stimulate the ice-sheet community to improve methods and agree on common framework when producing ice-sheet mass balance model projections for the next 100 years.

This meeting included a report by Ryan Walker on the outputs of the “Ice sheet MIP for CMIP6” workshop that was in July 2014 and initiated ISMIP6.

Projections of ice sheets mass balance over the next centuries strongly depend on the atmospheric and oceanic forcings. During the previous IPCC assessment (AR5), several groups produced projections but the methods to force the ice sheets models differed substantially. One difficulty comes from the fact that, in the framework of IPCC, atmospheric and oceanic fields from coupled AOGCMs are necessary but are available only by the end of an IPCC Assessment, too late to be used by ice sheet modelers for their own simulations in the corresponding report. For the last IPCC (AR5) report, this reduced for instance the number of ice sheet simulations done with an RCP8.5 scenario. Methods used to initialize ice sheet models, to downscale AOGCM fields, to take into account surface mass balance-elevation feedbacks and to use ocean characteristics to initiate dynamic response of the ice sheets (calving and grounding line retreat) are other examples that have been treated very differently by the various groups. We should now take advantage of the variety of methods applied during IPCC AR5 to compare them and evaluate their impact on the results. The objective is to improve the methods and agree on common framework when producing ice-sheet mass balance model projections for the next 100 years. This should help to derive realistic ranges of uncertainties in ice sheet projections.