A team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol, has discovered that a marked decrease in summer cloud cover during the last 20 years has significantly accelerated melt from the Greenland ice sheet.
The new findings, published today in Science Advances, show that less cloud cover and more summer sunshine allows increased solar radiation to reach the surface providing more energy for melting.
Using data from earth-observing satellites and high-resolution climate models, the authors found a consistent decrease in summer cloud cover since 1995.
The research shows that a one percent reduction in summer cloud cover is equivalent to 27 gigatons of extra ice melt on the Greenland ice sheet – this is roughly equivalent to the annual domestic water supply of the USA or 180 million times the weight of a blue whale.
Since 1995, researchers found that Greenland has lost a total of about 4,000 gigatons of ice, which has become the biggest single contributor to the rise in global sea levels.
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