De-tuning a coupled Climate Ice Sheet Model to simulate the North
American Ice Sheet at the Last Glacial Maximum
Abstract
The maximum extent of the last North American ice sheet is well
constrained empirically, but it has proven to be challenging to simulate
with coupled Climate-Ice Sheet models. Coupled Climate-Ice Sheet models
are often too computationally expensive to sufficiently explore
uncertainty in input parameters, and it is unlikely values calibrated to
reproduce modern ice sheets will reproduce the known extent of the ice
at the Last Glacial Maximum. To address this, we run a series of
ensembles with a coupled Climate-Ice Sheet model (FAMOUS-ice),
simulating the final stages of growth of the last North American Ice
Sheets’ maximum extent. Using this large ensemble approach, we explore
the influence of uncertain ice sheet, albedo, atmospheric, and oceanic
parameters on the ice sheet extent. We find that albedo parameters
determine the majority of uncertainty when simulating the Last Glacial
Maximum North American Ice Sheets. Importantly, different albedo
parameters are needed to produce a good match to the Last Glacial
Maximum North American Ice Sheets than have previously been used to
model the contemporary Greenland Ice Sheet, due to differences in cloud
cover over ablation zones. Thus calibrating coupled climate-ice sheet
models solely for present day strongly biases simulations of past and
future climates different from today.