Climate-driven interannual ice mass evolution in Greenland

We re-evaluate the Greenland mass balance for the recent period using low-pass Independent Component Analysis (ICA) post-processing of the Level-2 GRACE data (2002–2010) from different official providers (UTCSR, JPL, GFZ) and confirm the present important ice mass loss in the range of − 70 and − 90 Gt/y of this ice sheet, due to negative contributions of the glaciers on the east coast. We highlight the high inter-annual variability of mass variations of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS), especially the recent deceleration of ice loss in 2009–2010, once seasonal cycles are robustly removed by Seasonal Trend Loess (STL) decomposition. Interannual variability leads to varying trend estimates depending on the considered time span. Correction of post-glacial rebound effects on ice mass trend estimates represents no more than 8 Gt/y over the whole ice sheet. We also investigate possible climatic causes that can explain these ice mass interannual variations, as strong correlations between GRACE-based mass balance and atmosphere/ocean parallels are established: (1) changes in snow accumulation, and (2) the influence of inputs of warm ocean water that periodically accelerate the calving of glaciers in coastal regions and, feed-back effects of coastal water cooling by fresh currents from glaciers melting. These results suggest that the Greenland mass balance is driven by coastal sea surface temperature at time scales shorter than accumulation.