Assessment of glacier mass balances from small tropical glaciers to the large ice sheet of Greenland

A combination of field work, modeling, and remote sensing was used to determine mass balances for the Quelccaya Ice Cap in Peru and for parts of the Greenland Ice Sheet. A 40-year history of deglaciation on Quelccaya derived from satellite is presented. Automatic Weather Station and snow pit data throughout Greenland were utilized to determine a mass balance profile for the ice sheet which will serve as a baseline for future comparison. Finally, a series of models were tested in west-central Greenland for their ability to accurately simulate measured melt conditions given hourly observations of the surface meteorology. A new analytical melt model, SOSIM, was developed and tested for this study. Archived on Dataverse by Baptiste Vandecrux with approval from Todd Albert ([e-mail]).